Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC.

I'm so glad I read this book. It made me feel so seen and understood and it was so nice to not feel alone in this.

I cried a lot while reading through this book and it did bring up a lot of tough memories. It was a tough read, but so, so worth it.

I would recommend this book to everyone who was a "Good Kid", but especially to those that are now parents/ planning to become parents.

It's one of those books that you won't just read once, but that you'll refer back to over and over again throughout your journey.

This one hit deep. It peeled back the “good kid” mask I wore so many years and made me feel seen. The tone is gentle but firm, and the insights stuck with me long after reading.

As a "recovering good kid", this was so validating and I will be recommending to many! This book offers a compassionate and insightful analysis of the "good kid" persona and its often-hidden origins in relational shame trauma. This is for anyone who grew up feeling they had to suppress their needs and emotions to keep the peace and earn love. The clinical expertise and personal anecdotes are accessible, making that a major strength.

My only reason for not going higher than 4 stars is that the book can have a broad scope. The author covers a range of topics related to healing from relational trauma, from identifying the signs of a "good kid" in adulthood. I didn't mind as much, but it can be a daunting amount of information for some individuals.

Despite that, I definitely recommend this read. The message is ultimately of hope and self-acceptance. This book shifts the perspective from viewing your "good kid" traits as a personality flaw to understanding them as learned trauma responses.

What a validating book! Definitely recommend this one. The author writes very compassionately and is very insightful of the “good kid” persona.

Thank you to the author, NetGalley, and the publishers for this arc!

This is a life-changing book. It is full of wisdom that will help the reader gain many tools to live a more full and happy life. This is one I will return to again and again. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of the book.

Through this book, Maggie has excellently explained and blended research, her own lived experience and work from her practice to give Good Kids like me a voice. This book ripped me open emotionally, I wept from a vulnerable, deep inner child part that has longed to be seen and heard for a very long time. It inspired me to reflect on my own childhood while encouraging me to think critically about my own impact as a parent and teacher. The practical tools she shared give a gentle, not perfectionistic roadmap for healing my relationship with myself and my children. I will be buying extra copies of this book to give my friends who are also in the thick of their personal healing and parenting journeys!

Good Kids, written by trauma therapist and self-proclaimed good-girl Maggie Nick, is a book about healing the hurt we experienced in order to parent our children with the intentional care that many of us never received. This book reaches into your soul. It slips past all of the barricades and fortresses erected from a lifetime of trauma. It reaches and extracts the quietest, most unassuming splinter, and finally, after waiting to catch your eye, whispers gently, "See? This is what has been hurting you. You were never the problem."

For some of us, these will be the most loving words ever spoken to and about us. While reading this masterfully crafted guidebook, I lost count of the number of times I got choked up. As a mother who was unmothered, Good Kids is slowly opening my eyes to the fact that I actually was always lovable…and that my kids are too. Maggie Nick confronts all the ways in which we were programmed to believe something was wrong with us. She coaches us how to, not only lovingly reparent ourselves, but also how to disrupt these cycles as we parent our own children.

It would be perfectly reasonable to think a book of this nature would demonize parents from previous generations. However, this couldn't be farther from reality. Good Kids speaks to the truth that the generational trauma our parents passed to us was, at some point, also passed on to them.

This book will make you feel seen and loved in the most healing of ways. The tenderness with which Maggie Nick painstakingly illuminates, unbandages, and treats the wounds inflicted by our caregivers slowly opens the door to the idea that you are actually worthy of love and deserve to feel good.

Good Kids lays the groundwork for what we should have experienced as children and devotes the latter portion to specifically addressing our children's needs. I have been a mother for 8 years. For the first time, I have practical tools and strategies at my fingertips to help me parent with confidence and love instead of from trauma and triggers. The book also normalizes the idea that parenting perfectly is impossible but that our mistakes do not define our parenting abilities. In fact they provide the opportunity for us to model for our children what healthy repair looks like.

I think every single adult should read this book…especially if you have kids. Get ready for a parenting and reparenting revolution. Good Kids is that powerful.

Maggie Nick's "Good Kids" will speak to many adults who want to raise their children with a healthier, more supportive parenting style than they experienced but need to heal themselves to do so.

For readers who pick up this book, their parents probably behaved as Nick describes—doing the best they could with what they knew but falling short and creating long-lasting relational trauma and shame. It’s hard to write a general prescriptive description of any psychological trauma when there are so many nuances. We’ve all probably had one or two of the experiences described because no parent is perfect.

It took me longer than expected to read this book. I would read a few sentences then have to stop and let the ideas sink in. Initially I struggled to identify with the behaviors described; I have the psyche that results from being raised as a good kid but not to the extreme described. Then I got to the emotionally reactive description and stepped back into my childhood. I was a more rebellious kid while my older sister was the good kid, she took the brunt of our mother’s behavior, while I tended to mirror it—acting out, yelling back, which Nick explains is a release mechanism for children. Reading made me consider my friends’ parents and families, and no, not all families were like mine. There were supportive parents, safe relationships, and those kids grew up to recreate what they knew. I escaped by moving far from home, yet as we all know, wherever you go, there you are.

Today, we know so much more about child development and want to adopt behaviors that will help our children (and grandchildren) avoid the anxiety we experience as adults because of the traumatizing parenting style of our parents. Of course a book can’t replace therapy but Good Kids shines a light in the shadows of our childhoods to understand—and change—our adult behaviors and support our children in a healthy way, so they grown up to be resilient, secure kids who know how to regulate their emotions and build loving relationships.

The writing and messages are repetitive at times, especially in the early chapters, and yet the repetition effectively drives home Nick's points. I was anxious to read about solutions, which begin in Chapter 6 with tools for self-regulating. From chapter 7 on, I found myself understanding and beginning to relate and reflect. In particular, the second half of the book encompasses prescriptive narrative for parenting your child and reparenting yourself to heal through your relationship with your child. I would have like a "how to parent your parents" section that addressed the time of life when roles shift and children end up in a caretaking role; perhaps that is Nick's next book.

I appreciated Nick's honesty about her own struggles, reiterating the message that we should pass on to our children: no human is perfect, we all make mistakes, and I love you all the same.

Thank you to NetGalley and Sheldon Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

#netgalley #goodkids #sheldonpress

Excellent book giving plenty of insight on generational trauma, all the mechanics behind and the various ways to avoid repeating such negative mechanisms with our own children. A real eye opener, I found it really useful and easy to understand also.

Thank you, John Murray Press US | Sheldon Press, for this ARC!

Good Kids by Maggie Nick is a guide designed for "cycle-breakers". Parents who grew up as "Good Kids" (children who felt they had to earn love through perfection or obedience) are now seeking to heal their own trauma while raising their own children.

Themes explored:

✨Healing the "Good Kid" Identity
✨Reparenting Yourself
✨Breaking Generational Cycles
✨Nurturing Authenticity
✨Parenting as a Pathway to Healing

My thoughts: A win for those in the midst of healing their inner child and for those who want to be the best parents they can for their own kids. No matter where you are in your season of life, this is an educational book that is able to meet you where you are. So many great knowledge tidbits. As someone who studied psychology in school and also witness those I know take the brunt of a parent’s poor behavior, this book really hits the mark. Well done!

Pub Date Jan 27 2026

As always, all thoughts are my own! 🖤✨

"Good Kids" is a book that will speak to all the grown adults who never got to be children, who were expected to be more, and who were taught their worth was only as good as their behavior and their willingness to serve. Maggie Nick's words will resonate with anyone who grew up dealing with parentification, narcissistic family, and a lack of parenting. Adults who grew up in these manners now often suffer from people-pleasing, anxiety, fawning, an inability to draw boundaries...all because they were raised to fear not being worthy.

In perhaps what is the most moving sentence of this entire book: "You were a caterpillar doing your best to survive in a world that expected you to be a butterfly."

Full of gentle words of encouragement, explanations for why kids grow up without solid parenting and the repercussions of this, and guiding those now-adults to be better parents, "Good Kids" is a love letter to all of these children who suffered, many unknowingly, and are now raising their own families, desperate to break the toxic cycles they grew up in. If you are a parent, or someone who suffers from people-pleasing and fear of not being good enough, READ. THIS. BOOK. I guarantee even people who felt they didn't have bad childhoods may find something in here that shows they have healing today, not only for themselves, but for their children.

Thank you to NetGalley and John Murray Press US | Sheldon Press for the advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

"Not all 'bad behavior' is indicative of something wrong. [...] Not all good behavior is indicative of things being right."

Must-read book for any "Good Kid" looking to break the toxic, anxiety-inducing cycle. Maggie Nick truly captures what it means to carry a world of unrealistic expectations on one's shoulders, from childhood to adulthood. She covers all the bases, such as "are you mad at me?" validation-seeking, blaming oneself for another's lack of control, and valuing oneself only through accomplishments and productivity.

"You still blame yourself because they blamed you first. {...] I know your parents felt like they 'never had to worry about you.' But I wish they had."

The author describes how even "good childhoods" can be riddled with relational shame trauma, and does it in a way that does not bash one's parents, but rather sheds light and awareness on how these environments arise and persist.

"Your worth isn't somethig your earn-- it's something that should have always been yours, until the world made you feel otherwise."

The last third of the book dives into alternative strategies to avoid instilling "good kid" mentalities in our own children, including highlighting the importance of "Circling Back," not shying away from apologizing to our kids, and not dangling love as a reward that can be taken away. She highlights how this should not cross over into permissive parenting; a parent should still be a leader, not a cruise director. Strong boundaries are a necessity, which requires parents to be comfortable with their children being mad at them and to allow them to express rather than suppress those reactions. I loved the examples and walkthrough, and overall, found the book to be immensely helpful and beautifully written.

"The goal is not to never mess up. The goal is to break the damaging cycles when we do."

4.75 stars rounded up to 5, mainly because some sections were a little repetitive, and I feel like the book could be equally impactful with 50 fewer pages.

"What kids need-- what any human in pain needs-- is for someone to see them hurting and choose to stay-- to see them, to sit next to them with their pain, and to trust that it hurts the way they say it hurts."

Thank you, NetGalley and John Murray Press, for the opportunity to read an advanced reader's copy in exchange for my honest opinions.

"You were a caterpillar doing your best to survive in a world that expected you to be a butterfly."

Good Kids by Maggie Nick was an interesting and relatable read. I could connect with some of the experiences shared and appreciated the wide range of reasons presented for why someone might identify as a “recovering Good Kid.”

I found the book easy to read overall, though some sections felt a bit repetitive and could likely have been shortened. I also would have liked the references to be listed more directly alongside the relevant content in the chapters rather than only at the end of the book.

Despite these small critiques, this was a thoughtful and accessible read that may resonate with many readers.

Wow! A must read for anyone that resonates with being “the good kid”

This book was truly one of the best self-help books I’ve ever read. It delves deep into the dynamics of childhood for those of us who were labelled as the "good kid." The insights it offers helped me better understand how being the “good kid” shaped my behaviour, my identity, and my relationships as an adult. The book took me some time to read and digest, as it is impactful on a personal level.
I’ve opened my eyes to traits that I thought were just who I was, but were actually rooted in the need to be the “good kid.” It gave me the strength to recognise and let go of some of those behaviours.

Ultimately, this book has given much needed clarity and is a must read for anyone who’s spent their life trying to meet others’ expectations at the cost of their own well-being.

Thank you to NetGalley & Sheldon Press for this ARC

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I'm too well-adjusted/therapised for books like these I find. This book didn't have any new insights for me at all, but then again I have spent years looking at the various ways in which being mentally ill, a girl and queer in my family environment has affected my family relationships and how I was treated vis à vis my sister and brother (and my sister and I have had PLENTY conversations on it). If you have already been through therapy for your family trauma or related issues, I fear this book will be pretty much useless, as it's a very basic "neglect and its effects 101", but for someone who is first now starting to grapple with the potential that their upbringing might have traumatised them, I would recommend this book.

I'd be very interested to see how my mum and my sister feel about this book, as their mental health journey has been VERY different from mine (I was forced to come to terms with my mental health because it simply couldn't be ignored anymore, I was hospitalised frequently, while no one else in my family had such extreme issues), and if maybe they would be able to find more value in this book than I was able to.

4 stars for the potential and because I acknowledge that I might not quite be the target audience, despite sharing the "good kid" experiences.