Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist who has a private practice and works with parents to solve tricky situations with their children. The underlying desire among all the parents she has worked with is the desire to improve their parenting. Dr. Kennedy helps unpack children’s behaviors, which she believes function as windows into what is going on with them emotionally. Thus, she doesn’t use common parenting strategies like reward and punishment, which work only at the behavioral level, rather than the emotional one.

Through Dr. Kennedy’s experiences doing play therapy with children as a PhD student at Columbia, counseling adults, and operating a training program for clinicians to approach troubling behavior in children, she has reached the conclusions that inform her practice: A number of unresolved issues in adults stem from childhood, and eradicating “bad” behavior in children often demands obedience while compromising connection.

Based on these conclusions, Dr. Kennedy developed an approach that combines her work in attachment theory, mindfulness, and the internal family systems model and that prioritizes connection over consequence. She offers practical, solutions-based parenting strategies that also promote healing within parents, as parenting is about both the child’s and the parent’s development.