Dr. Becky Kennedy: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, first of all, I'll start with the baseline, right? That as a clinical psychologist, I was initially trained in this very reward, punishment, timeout, sticker chart, mode. And to be honest, I loved it, because I have a very healthy left brain and our left brains love logic and we love linearity. And as soon as you're a parent, you're like, there's no linearity or logic really, but our brain wants that to be a system. And it's kind of a system of punish the bad and you have less of the bad and reward the good. And no one really says, Well, how are we raising a human? Those are just behaviors, but our brain loves it. And that's what I started teaching to parents, I did, in my private practice, because it felt clean. But it was at complete odds with everything I knew was helping all the adults in my practice change their lives. And that's actually what gave me insight into starting Good Inside. It's like, there's no way that what helps the 35-year-old rewire their brain and change for the better, is that theoretical opposition with what a two-year-old and five-year-old needs to become resilient and confident. That just doesn't make sense. And I think we have these ideas about kids. Even something I hear a lot, you're making a bad choice, to kids. You're a good person, you're making a bad choice. This is not about forgiving bad behavior, I'm pretty firm about that. But I just don't believe a four-year-old who's throwing is like, hold on, should I throw this at my sister? Should I or should I not? I will choose as not... I mean, think about us. When we act out, I don't think most of us are in a decision making place. We escalate and here's one of the big insights besides people are good inside, that helped me form all of my other approaches, is kids are born with all the feelings and none of the skills to manage feelings. Bad behavior at any age can basically be reduced to feelings that overpower skills. And yes, behavior is a problem, but behavior isn't the core problem. It's a manifestation of the problem. The actual problem is someone doesn't have the skill they need to manage something happening internally. And if they had that skill and could access it, the behavior would change. But that would be kind of the outcome, not the place of actual intervention. And so, when a kid hits, they look also and kids will say things like, "I don't care what you say." They're out of control. Maybe they're in a situation where, I don't know, they could be tired, but also they're angry that a sibling has a toy and they don't have skills to manage anger, they're jealous that someone is playing with something and they can't manage the jealousy. And when you look at bad behavior through the lens of feelings that overpower skills, you start to think like a coach. It always has struck me with kids, that we don't punish them into learning how to swim, which I know sounds funny. But if you paid for swim lessons and the person said, You know what? nk like a coach. It always has struck me with kids, that we don't punish them into learning how to swim, which I know sounds funny. But if you paid for swim lessons and the person said, You know what? I'm just not going to put up with this. It's this inappropriate behavior. By the way, your kid has to learn to swim if they're going to function in life. So, send them to their room and tell them to come back when they learn how to swim. It's absurd, it's obviously laughable. I think swimming is very important, but an even more important life skill is learning how to manage your emotions. It is. And nobody learns new skills by being sent to their room, nobody learns new skills by adding shame. All that does is increase the gap between feelings and skills. It's just totally counterproductive. The answer is, we have to set boundaries. We have to be the people setting boundaries around out of control behavior. But then we actually have to teach our kids the skills they were missing, which levels up the skills. And that's how not only you change behavior short term, but you actually change behavior massively long term. I'm actually in the middle of starting potty training with our kid and I'm taking this little online course and they call it potty learning, not potty training, for exactly that reason. You're not training them to do a thing. They don't know how to do it, so you just teach them, like you're teaching them the alphabet, just teach them all little steps and what they need to learn.…

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