Protocols for Excellent Parenting & Improving Relationships of All Kinds | Dr. Becky Kennedy

1. Master Two Core Parenting Jobs

Understand your two primary roles as a parent: setting clear boundaries and offering empathy and validation. This framework is essential for being a sturdy leader in your child’s life.

2. Cultivate Sturdiness in Relationships

Aim to be sturdy in all relationships, meaning you can stay connected to your own values and needs while simultaneously connecting to someone else’s, even if they differ. This balance is key to healthy interactions.

3. Define Boundaries by Your Actions

Set boundaries by stating what you will do, rather than what you expect the other person to do. This ensures your boundaries are within your control and don’t rely on another’s compliance.

4. Combine Boundaries with Empathy

When setting a boundary, validate the other person’s feelings about it, even if you don’t agree with their behavior. This teaches emotion regulation by allowing them to feel their feelings while you maintain the boundary.

5. Use ‘I Believe You’ to Validate

When someone is upset, respond with ‘I believe you’ to make them feel real and understood, fostering self-trust and confidence. This diffuses emotional intensity and allows them to process their feelings in connection.

6. Repair with Self Before Child

After an emotional outburst, first repair with yourself by separating your identity from your behavior (e.g., ‘I’m a good parent who had a hard moment’). This allows you to approach your child for repair from a place of self-regulation, not guilt.

7. Process Emotional Events in Connection

Ensure that highly emotional events are processed in connection with a trusted adult, rather than in aloneness, to prevent them from becoming traumatic. This helps children understand their experiences and feel safe.

8. Foster Intrinsic Motivation for Chores

Instead of rewarding chores, frame them as a way of being a purposeful and meaningful part of the family team. Ask children what would help them remember their responsibilities, empowering them to solve problems.

9. Build Self-Trust as Confidence

Redefine confidence as self-trust, the belief that you truly know how you feel and what you experience. This is cultivated by having your feelings believed by others, rather than being told not to feel a certain way.

10. Hold Hope for Child’s Coping

As a parent, actively hold hope that your child can cope with difficult situations and express this belief to them. This helps them envision a more mature version of themselves and build resilience.

11. Interpret Rudeness Generously

When faced with rudeness (e.g., ‘I hate you’), seek the most generous interpretation of the behavior, often recognizing it as intense disappointment or pain. This helps you respond from a place of understanding rather than anger.

12. Respond to Rudeness with Sturdiness

When a child is rude, maintain a sturdy presence by not taking the bait or engaging in a ping-pong match of negativity. You can state, ‘I believe you’re disappointed, and I know there’s another way to say that.’

13. Contain Deeply Feeling Kids’ Emotions

For children who experience intense emotions, physically contain them (e.g., move to a smaller room) while reassuring them, ‘I am not scared of your feelings.’ This provides a boundary, protection, and safety, showing their feelings don’t dictate everything.

14. Guide Energy, Don’t Suppress It

When children have high energy or urges, focus on telling them what they can do rather than what they can’t. This works with their natural forces, allowing for healthy expression instead of suppression.

15. Deliberately Introduce Frustration

Actively insert small, tolerable frustrations into your child’s life from an early age. This is critical for developing their ability to cope with frustration, counteracting a world of instant gratification.

16. Lengthen Time in Learning Space

When a child is struggling with a task, prioritize lengthening the amount of time they tolerate being in the ’learning space’ (the gap between not knowing and knowing). This builds the circuit for sustained effort and resilience, not just immediate success.

17. Manage Self-Feelings as Passengers

View your feelings and urges as passengers in your car, not the driver, allowing them to be present without taking control. Use the mantra ‘You’re a part of me, not all of me’ to validate feelings while maintaining boundaries.

18. Notice and Discuss Wins

After a child overcomes a challenge, pause to notice and discuss their success without praise or control. Ask open-ended questions like, ‘What was it you think that led you to feel good about how it went?’ to help them internalize their capabilities.

19. Support Teen Identity Formation

Understand that a teen’s developmental job is to separate and form their own identity, which often involves overcorrecting and creating distance. Prepare for a sense of loss, but know that this distance is not their final point and they will eventually move closer.

20. Offer Connection Bids to Teens

Even when teens reject you or say ‘get out of my room,’ they still need bids for connection. Slip a note under their door saying, ‘That was tough, you’re a good kid, and I love you,’ to maintain their home base.

21. Center Child’s Experience in Co-Parenting

When co-parenting or dealing with different caretaker approaches, prioritize helping your child understand their experience rather than focusing on the other adult’s ‘wrong’ actions. Talk to your child about their feelings and offer a safe space to process.

22. Prioritize Parental Relationship, Self-Care

Maintain your own identity and needs outside of caregiving, prioritizing your relationship with your partner and personal self-care. This models sturdiness and prevents burnout, showing children that your relationship with them is important but not all-consuming.

23. Seek External Help for Wayward Teens

If a teen’s behavior (e.g., substance use, withdrawal) impacts their overall functioning or limits their world, intervene by seeking additional professional support. Communicate to them, ‘My number one job is to keep you safe, not happy with me,’ and follow through with necessary interventions.

24. Understand Entitlement as Fear

Recognize that entitlement often stems from a deep fear of frustration, where children learn that frustration is overwhelming and someone else will always provide an exit. This reframes the behavior from ‘spoiled’ to ‘vulnerable.’

25. Deliberately Create Frustration Experiences

To combat entitlement, purposefully create small moments where children experience frustration, such as running errands with you or doing mundane chores. This teaches them to tolerate discomfort and that rules apply to everyone.

26. Use Chores to Teach Life Skills

Assign chores to teach children that life involves doing boring things and contributing to the household. The goal is to build character and purpose, not necessarily to earn money.

27. Use Anger as a Guide

When feeling angry as a parent, use that anger as a signal to understand what needs are not being met or what systems are stacked against you. This reframes anger from a negative emotion to a helpful indicator for change.

28. Stay Hydrated with Electrolytes

Dissolve one packet of Element in 16-32 ounces of water first thing in the morning and during physical exercise. Proper hydration and electrolyte balance are critical for optimal brain and body function.

29. Enforce Boundaries with Direct Action

If a request isn’t followed, take direct action to enforce the boundary, such as physically turning off the TV or picking up a child from the couch. This demonstrates your role as a sturdy leader without relying on the child’s compliance.

30. Apologize Directly and Take Responsibility

Offer simple, direct apologies like ‘I’m sorry I yelled,’ taking full responsibility without ‘buts’ or blaming the child. This validates their experience and helps snatch self-blame out of their body.