Rethinking How We Parent with Dr. Becky Kennedy
Rethinking How We Parent with Dr. Becky Kennedy
A conversation with the celebrated clinical psychologist on her belief that we are all ‘Good Inside.’
Welcome to So Many Thoughts, a semi-weekly newsletter about royal style and the other parts of life I want to think through with you. You can subscribe here and follow me on Instagram at @EHolmes. Thank you!
Hello! Our community has grown a bit in these last few weeks. I want to extend a very warm welcome to the newest readers. Typically, this newsletter comes out twice a week, with one edition diving into a royal topic and the other devoted to another subject I am thinking a lot about.
Today’s newsletter falls into the latter camp, addressing something that consumes much of my life these days: Parenting. To that end, I am thrilled to bring you a conversation with Dr. Becky Kennedy, author of Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want To Be, which debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list last week. The ways in which Dr. Becky has reframed parenting struggles have been truly transformative to me — not just as a mother but as a person who holds things tightly and feels things deeply. I hope you find our chat as useful as I did.
You can pick up a copy of Good Inside at your local independent bookstore, Bookshop.org, or Amazon. And follow Dr. Becky on Instagram at @DrBeckyatGoodInside.
So Many Thoughts from Dr. Becky
Early on in the pandemic, locked in my house and starting to panic, I stumbled across Dr. Becky Kennedy on Instagram. This was before her account exploded; I can’t even remember what post of hers made me click “follow.” But there was something about the way in which she gave parenting advice — in short, direct-to-the-camera videos — that resonated deeply with me. Her posts feel intimate and raw, less like something crafted for social media and more like a one-on-one Facetime call with your (super smart) friend.
If you watch enough of Dr. Becky’s videos, you’ll pick up on the formula: She introduces a parenting challenge, steps back to consider what could be causing it, then offers sample scripts for how to address it. What I love most, however, is that none of her advice is based on rewards or consequences; it is about seeing the feelings.
Yours truly fan-girling at the chance to moderate a conversation with Dr. Becky in Los Angeles earlier this month.
A mother of three and Columbia University-trained clinical psychologist, Dr. Becky centers her philosophy — which since garnered her more than 1.4 million Instagram followers — on the belief that we are all good inside. Her approach, of connecting with and respecting your children, has helped me immeasurably with my own children. I cannot tell you how many times Matt and I start a conversation about a parenting struggle with, “Dr. Becky said…”
Which is to say, I leapt at the chance to moderate a conversation with her earlier this month as part of her book launch here in Los Angeles. Listening to her IRL, I may have cried…more than once. Dr. Becky’s guidance is about so much more than parenting. It’s about reframing and rethinking the way we were raised and the way we feel things. It has helped me see so many life challenges in new and welcome lights.
Dr. Becky and her team graciously said I could record the chat to share with you. Important note: In order to bring you all of Dr. Becky’s goodness — we talked for an hour, which meant so very many thoughts — I have broken this up into two posts.
Below you will find the first half of our conversation, about zooming out on problems, upgrading your questions, and the power of feelings “benches.” (Make sure you read to the end about those benches! That is when I started crying.)
To read the second half, about the importance of “connection capital,” why shame makes us freeze, and how to talk with your partner about tricky topics, click here for the post on my Bulletin page.
Note: Our conversation has been edited and condensed throughout.
EH: I’d love for you to start by telling us how Dr. Becky became Dr. Becky.
I’ve always found people fascinating and I realized I could make a career out of getting to know people better. That’s why I became a psychologist. And then years into my private practice, I always felt this desire for more movement. I wanted to get out of my chair. I wanted to move around and talk to more people.
My husband reminded me, “Whenever you come home from these parenting groups you run, you want to talk to me for hours. And no offense, I don't really care about other moms’ problems with their kids. We have enough going on.” Then he would say, “I love you, write it down.”
I literally started to write one day and I had six weeks where I was up at 4am and I couldn’t stay in bed. I remember exactly where I was on my couch when my husband said, “Well, it lives on your computer or you share it with people. Those are the only two options.”
On February 20, 2020, I had 200 [Instagram] followers. Two weeks later, New York City shut down and I felt this post: “I have got to get this out. It’s going to be really good.” It was about how our kids are going to remember more about how their family homes felt during a pandemic than anything about a pandemic itself: Let’s wire our kids for resilience, not panic; here are nine ideas of how to do that.
They were 14 years of therapy in nine slides. But it went viral and a couple weeks later, 5,000 Instagram followers, and then obviously more things from that. But that’s how it all started.
There are so many different lessons there, but the thing I’ve learned more than anything else is if someone told me then that I would write a book or have a company with 17 full-time female employees I’d be like, “I can’t do that. That’s a huge thing.” But starting — actually the process of writing — allowed me to have new thoughts that then I wrote down. The process of starting led to so much more knowing, which led to starting something new. And I just have so much faith in our ability to start something and trust that something good is going to happen next. That’s how it all began.
EH: Let’s talk about your overall philosophy that we are all good inside. Where did that come from?
When I was in grad school, nobody ever said to me, “We do timeouts and punishments because we believe kids are bad inside.” Because if they said that, you’d be like, “Wow, that sounds really harsh. I don’t buy that.”
The way I was taught to work with parents — I was like, “Let me go get the best training” — I went to the evidence-based, gold-standard, East Coast, ivy league training. At first, I loved every part of it. I was like, “This is so logical. We just extinguish the bad and we reinforce the good with timeouts and sticker charts.”
One day in my private practice, I heard myself telling parents how to give a time out. At that time, I had two kids and I was like, “I would never do this to my own kids. This is just wrong.” We talk so much about evidence-based data. And I completely respect it, but data has to be consumed thoughtfully. I was like, “Well, what about the data in my body that says this doesn’t feel good?” I have chills as I say that — why are we taught that that isn’t something we should trust?
Speaking of trust, this is just a powerful thing to think about in all your non-child relationships too: Control and trust are opposites. We only control things and people that we don’t trust. And the only reason we control a kid through essentially a behavior-shaping model is that we don’t trust them. Then kids grow up looking at their parents looking back at them. They don’t really care about the individual moments. But what they feel is: I don’t trust you. That forms their identity. We literally give kids this “bad kid” role.
I was like, “There’s got to be a different way.” I told this couple in my private practice [as I was teaching how to give a time out], “I’m sorry, I don’t believe anything I’m telling you. I’m going to give you your money back.” And I remember thinking there has to be another way, based on everything I know has helped so many of the adults I see.
I knew I had to make it as concrete and practical and strategic and usable in the moment because that’s the only way we almost have a chance together of standing up against this very different model that is shoved down our throats all over the place.
EH: So much parenting advices is about kids. I love how you focus on the adults in the equation.
On the [Good Inside] platform, someone DM-ed me and said, “I don't even really think you care about kids. I think you get our attention through kids because our defenses are a little lower and we’re motivated, but you’re really in the business of helping adults feel more empowered and better about themselves.”
I was like, “Two things can be true.” But I think that this approach is resonating because I do think it’s more for the parent behind the parenting than it is just a parenting book.
If you think about being a cycle breaker in a huge way — or even some small way — every generation before you did things one way. They all didn’t talk about feelings. They all sent kids to their room or they all didn’t treat kids with respect. All of them. Even though I also believe all of them were doing the best they could with what they had available.
That is a huge weight and we are saying, “Nope that stops with me.” And yet, if we want to really turn that impulse into action, there’s a lot of rewiring [that needs to happen] in our body. Without intervention, we parent the way we were parented. It’s not because we want to, it’s because our body always beats our brain. Our body is wired that way.
And yet there’s something very hopeful: We can actually rewire. But the rewiring isn’t going to come actually from memorizing a script, the rewiring is going to come from thinking about what I need, what I didn’t get, how I can think about my own boundaries — not just for my kids’ benefit, but for my benefit. And I think taking on a new model where we really feel empowered and we’re really building our enough-ness as we’re trying to give that to our kids at the same time.
EH: I know you said it’s not about scripts, but one thing I love about your Instagram is that you give scripts. You model scenarios and responses as an example. I use those all the time.
I love scripts, too, because it gets us to open the door. I know I want to go into that room, so if a script helps us open a door, it’s that starting point. Now I can walk in there.
The way I make videos, or the way I think about our bigger workshops or chapters in the book, is the way I would if you came to my office in private practice. Inevitably someone comes in with a very specific problem: “My kids never listen” or “My kids seem to have bigger tantrums than everyone else. I want help with that.”
Usually there is an arc in the session. I ask for specifics — I really like the specifics, I think that’s important. I zoom out: What’s really happening here? What’s going on underneath that behavior? What’s really motivating that behavior? What skills doesn’t the kid have? What does this bring up in you?
EH: Can you give us an example of zooming out?
At Good Inside, we always say: We have to understand before we intervene. That’s just a core tenet of everything we do.
Say your kid is not sleeping. And you just had a baby. You have a baby and a toddler — there’s no sleeping. Well, sleep is a form of separation anxiety; when you have a baby, your older kid is going to have a lot of separation anxiety because they’re like, “A baby came. My whole world has changed. I’m not so stupid to let my mom out of my sight at night. That’s too many hours. What else could change? At least I’ll be safe when I’m with my mom.”
That bigger context is so important. It’s very different than a kid who saw something scary yesterday and that’s keeping them up. The problem looks the same on the surface, but actually the problem’s very, very different. One kid who watched a scary movie could have sleep issues. One kid could be having tantrums. It actually is the same struggle just coming out in different ways.
So get specific and zoom out. Then we can jump back into the scenario and then the scripts and the strategies are useful, but they’re only useful because I have a foundation.
EH: I’m really trying with my three kids to zoom out more often and reframe the problem in front of me.
On the topic of reframing, this is one of the most powerful things I’ve learned through working with so many parents — especially when we feel most stuck with our kids: “They won’t get out the door” or “They are having trouble going to sleep at night” or “They’re saying ‘I hate you’ over and over.”
When I’m really stuck, the thing that gets us unstuck is trying to generate a different framework — not thinking about a solution. The answer is to ask yourself a different question, to upgrade your question to a question that’s useful.
Here is an example: “Why is my kid so defiant? I told them no pretzels before dinner. I literally said ‘No pretzels.’ I went to the bathroom and they were eating pretzels in front of me.”
Defiant to me is a word I get triggered by because I don’t like anyone I call defiant. And I don’t ever want to have a framework where I don’t like my kid because, as soon as I don’t like my kid, I see them as the enemy. That’s the only way I’m going to intervene.
I remember parents asking “So they’re not being defiant?” I said, “I don’t even know the answer. I just know it’s not useful. And I'm just interested in effectiveness.” There are many ways to describe things that are true. It’s about finding one that works.
So instead of defiant, I may say, “I wonder if my kid’s looking for ways to show me their independence? And, without other ways to do that, they’re acting that out through getting a snack?”
The way I would reframe defiance is: “I wonder if my kid had a really strong urge and then felt like I wasn’t seeing that as real?”
Instead of saying, “Of course, you can have pretzels,” and walking out, I wonder if I actually said, at that moment, “Oh, you really want pretzels. I often want pretzels too before dinner. Look, we're not going to have them.” Maybe in that situation, I’d just say, “Hey, how about we put a couple on your plate?” But even if I said the first version, my kid would probably not be defiant because they felt seen.
That intervention only came to me because I changed my framework. As long as I'm in, “My kid’s being defiant” mode, the only strategies I’m going to think of is: They need to not have TV for a week. I’m the only one who’s actually going to be harmed by saying that! Now my kid can’t watch TV for a week.
There’s almost something paradoxical: We feel stuck because our frameworks keep us stuck. Reframing is the most powerful skill to build as a parent. It’s asking yourself a different question. You might not even know the answer, but saying, “How else could I look at this?”
EH: When we talked for the piece I wrote about restraint collapse, you mentioned seeing yourself on the same team as your children. That reframing was so powerful.
I’m a very visual person. In these moments, I ask: Am I looking [across a table] at my partner or my kid like they’re the problem? Or am I sitting next to my partner or my kid and we are looking at a problem on the other side of the table together?
No conversation should ever happen until you get yourself in that second mindset. This is as applicable to a partner as it is to an in-law as it is to work whenever there’s a point of conflict.
Maybe my partner wants to go to his family’s for the holidays. And I want to go to my family’s. It’s the difference between saying: “You always make this difficult. You know your parents suck and we’re not going to go to their house for the holidays anyway” or “We went there last year. You're being ridiculous. We always switch.” Versus saying, “Hey, something’s going on, we have a problem. We want to be two places at once. Let me hear you out. And then maybe you can hear me out and I just have faith that that’s going to lead to somewhere good.” We’re here for effectiveness — not being right.
Another example of that would be, instead of saying to your kid, “You never get ready in the morning. And then we get into an argument. Those mornings are miserable” try this: “Hey, the mornings are a problem. Let’s be honest, they’re not good for either of us. There must be some things we can think about to just make the mornings more pleasant. And I don’t know. I’m just wondering if you have any ideas? I’m going to think about it too. I’m all ears.”
Feelings are distressing. A lot of them are. But the thing that makes feelings unmanageable is when we feel alone in them. And that's actually really empowering because when it comes to our kids, I can’t remove their feelings. But I can always remove aloneness. Always.
EH: This is the perfect segue to your idea of prioritizing resilience over happiness in our kids. I feel the pressure to want “happy” kids, but to what end?
This is one of my favorite things to talk about. I hear this a lot from parents: “I just want my kid to be happy.” We have this black-and-white way of thinking that’s like, “Does that mean we want our kids to be unhappy?” No, there’s a lot between those buckets.
In all my years of private practice, I’ve never heard an adult come in and say, “My parents were such amazing parents that they successfully got rid of disappointment, jealousy, sadness, feeling left out, feeling anger. All the feelings that are hard to manage — they actually got rid of! I’m just happy all the time.”
But what I did hear all the time, though never in words but through experiences, is “I am now 35 and I literally don’t have any better coping mechanisms for any of those feelings than I did when I was two. But the stakes are a lot higher now. And that’s scary.”
How do we not get there? Let’s think about your kid. Say they got cut from the soccer team. If I’m prioritizing happiness, I’d say this to my kid, if I had the resources: “Hey, there’s a soccer team 45 minutes away. I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to drive you. We’re going to get you on a soccer team.”
Here’s what’s happening in your kid’s body. They’re feeling disappointed. And they come to us with that feeling. And this is what they see in us: Terror. They see that we are terrified of them being disappointed.
Now their body encodes disappointment, which feels hard, extra aloneness, they’re alone in the feeling because we won’t be in it with them. But not only are we alone, they’re like, “Wow, this feeling, this can make me cry. This feeling must be as bad as it feels in my body. It must be unmanageable because even my adult is running circles to try to make me not have this feeling. This feeling could eviscerate me. This is so bad.” This isn’t one moment. We’re talking about patterns and patterns.
Now let's fast forward and we think about circuitry activating. Now this kid got fired from his job. That happens. Nobody feels good about that. But if you think about the wiring, they’re looking for the happy. In that case they'd be like, "Well, where’s my new job?”
Guess what? There’s not always a job waiting for you. And if that’s your wiring, not only are you going to be disappointed, you’re actually going to be completely unable to cope with that thing that just happened. So there’s a huge paradox here. The more we focus on happiness in childhood, the more we set a kid up for anxiety and emptiness in adulthood.
Anxiety is just the experience of not wanting to feel your feelings. I personally don’t think it’s an original feeling. It’s a reaction to a feeling. So the feelings that we couldn’t sit with with our kids become wired as the feelings they need to run away from in their adult lives. And I don’t think anyone in this room is like, “I hope my kid can never cope with those feelings.”
EH: YES. We want kids who can cope with feelings. So what is resilience?
There’s a visual and, of all the visuals, it’s my favorite one. Picture your kid, they’re in a garden and there’s a million benches and each bench represents a feeling or experience. In this situation, they’d be on the “I got cut from the soccer team” bench. But I think we can generalize, it’s the “things didn’t go my way” bench or “I’m disappointed” bench. Maybe it’s the “I’m embarrassed because my friends did get it and I didn’t” bench.
And they’re sitting there. As parents, we often have two instincts. One is to go over and infuse self doubt into their body. We tell our kid, “That bench that you think you’re on is not really a bench. It's not that bad. It’s fine. There's so many other sports you could play.”
Or we do something different. We see the sunny, happy bench and we’re like, “Just come over here. Get up and come with me.”
And then you think about this garden that your kids will be walking through in adulthood. And if you think about all the benches they’re terrified to sit on as a result because they’re so dark. They literally were alone in it: “Oh, there’s that disappointed bench. I cannot sit on there.”
What is resilience? Resilience is built when a kid is on a bench and you find them and you just sit down on it. And your presence changes everything.
So what does that really mean practically?
“Oh I didn’t make the soccer team this year!” A first reaction could be, “Ohhh” (EH: Dr. Becky made a very sympathetic sigh.) That’s it. Another response, one of my favorite lines: “You did not want that to happen. I’m so glad we're talking about this.” I'm showing my kid that I can tolerate their experience.
Now does that preclude me at some point from being, “Maybe there is another soccer team?” But I think we all know when we’re having a flight into “avoidance happiness” and when we've figured out something else, because it’s actually a helpful way of problem solving. Right?
What else would I say to my kid in that situation? I’d say this, “I believe you. This is really bad. I believe you. You’re embarrassed to see your friends tomorrow.”
Because how many of us know in adulthood, sometimes your friends get things that you don’t and it’s not easy just because you’re an adult. Our kids are going to be out of our homes for so much longer than they’re in our homes. And I don’t think they’ll ever call and say, “I think you gave me such good wiring mom. You're amazing.” But we’ll see it acted out. And I want my kids to have coping skills for the things that I think we actually need coping skills.
And so resilience in childhood and helping our kids see that these feelings they have are tolerable to us is what really builds that.
***For the second half of my conversation with Dr. Becky, click here.***
So many helpful thoughts, including the importance of identifying shame, tips for talking constructively with your partner, and why we need to ask our kids more questions.
My sincerest thanks to Dr. Becky! You can find Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want To Be wherever you buy your books.
The So Many Thoughts Newsletter comes out twice a week. You can subscribe and catch up on the archives here, including:
➡️ Restraint Collapse is So Real
➡️ What’s at the Heart of Grief? Love, Actually
➡️ ‘Ada Twist, Scientist’ Author Andrea Beaty on the Importance of Empathy
💭 Have Thoughts to share? I’d love to hear them! Hit “Join the Discussion” and leave a comment on my Bulletin page. You can also send me an email at Hello@SoManyThoughts.com. And you can find me on Instagram at @EHolmes.