We spend too much time making sure our boys know the right answer, and not enough time helping them build the emotional skills to act on it when the stakes are high. “Should you respect someone’s no?” Yes. “Should you speak up when something bad is happening?” Yes. Our kids can ace that test. Now add rejection. Add wanting to belong. Add: “If I say something, my friends might turn on me.” Knowing

Melinda French Gates has run some of the most powerful rooms in the world. She co-founded and co-chaired the Gates Foundation. She's sat across from heads of state. And in her 40s, at the top of her career, she started doubting herself in meetings she'd run a hundred times before. She talks to Dr. Becky about why: chronic insomnia; undiagnosed perimenopause; a body that had learned, years earlier,

Two parents came to Dr. Becky on the same day, both worried about their kid's confidence. One had a kid who wouldn't join the group. The other had a teenager who wouldn't leave the group. Dr. Becky says: maybe confidence isn’t what we think it is. She breaks down what confidence actually means, then she names three things well-meaning parents do that quietly work against building that kind of conf

Was today a good day? Did my kid seem happy? If the answer is no, even a little, it can feel like the whole day failed, like you failed. Dr. Becky sits down with Kate Bowler , a professor at Duke University, to make the case that happiness might be the wrong thing to optimize for in the first place. Happiness, Kate argues, is really just ease: a hundred small circumstances lining up so nothing fee

Chris Voss is a former FBI lead kidnapping negotiator, bestselling author of Never Split The Difference, and founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group ; a negotiation, training, coaching, and consulting organization that teaches people how to achieve better outcomes in high-stakes conversations. Today, he teaches some of these same skills to parents - and it turns out the thing that gets a hostage-t

Misty Copeland grew up sleeping on a motel floor with five siblings, unsure where the next meal was coming from. At 13, she walked into her first ballet class and felt something she'd never felt before: safe. Dr. Becky talks with the first Black woman to become a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre about the years she was asked to paint her skin to match the rest of the corps, the mentors

We all know too much screen time isn’t good for kids—and our instinct as parents is to protect them from it. But when fear shapes how we manage screens at home, it can quickly turn into shame the moment they pick one up. In today’s world, where screens are woven into so much of daily life, the real challenge is to face that reality with thoughtfulness – and to make choices guided by our values, no

Twelve weeks of parental leave. Then you're back at your desk, wondering why it feels so hard. Today we’re posting an episode from Rattled, our podcast for parents of newborns and babies, because it’s about something everybody experiences. It’s the final part of our three-part series with Care.com on finding care for your baby, and it's about a transition nobody preps you for: going back to work.

If you’ve yelled at your kid, you’re not a bad parent. You’re a good parent with an overwhelmed nervous system. In today’s revisit from the Good Inside archives, Dr. Becky breaks down the science behind yelling, snapping, and shutting down. She explains why our bodies react before our brains can catch up – and how understanding this will help you pause, reset, and reconnect. * Thank you to our par

Your kid hits. Melts down the second you leave the house. Argues about everything, all day, every single day. You've tried the time-outs, the consequences, the calm-down corner. Nothing works. Why are we always at that cliff? Dr. Becky spent two hours in a Reddit thread literally called "Nothing Works" and pulled three real posts to build this episode. Her answer: you're intervening at the cliff,

What does depression look like? It’s not always… sadness. It can be anger. Irritability. Picking fights. Checking out. Taking risks that don't make sense. It can look, to everyone around you — including you — like a character problem, not a medical condition. Christopher Choukalas is an ICU physician at UCSF. Six months after his twin daughters were born, he had every symptom on the paternal postp

What happens when two become three, or four, or five? Who is responsible for the needs and wants of a couple when days are filled with playdates, pick-ups, and meal preps? Nights lack the erotic energy that couples need not only to survive but to thrive. This week, Dr. Becky consults with the renowned couples therapist, Esther Perel, to talk about what parents can do to rekindle their desires. * T

Belle Burden was, by her own account, the good girl. Quiet, compliant, the kid who wrote her own book report and did her homework on Friday afternoons. Then one night in the second week of the 2020 lockdown, a stranger left a voicemail: your husband is having an affair with my wife. By 6 a.m. her 20-year marriage was over, and the life she thought she could count on stopped making sense. In her me

There's a lot of noise about what AI will do to jobs. What will it do to one of the most important jobs in the world: parenting? Dr. Dana Suskind is a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon and neuroscientist who has spent her career on how young brains get built. In this conversation, she and Dr. Becky start with a piece of bait — can a parent be replaced by a machine? — and spend the next half hour

When a woman becomes a mother, her brain physically reorganizes around the baby. We've known this for a while. What we didn't know (until recently) is that the same thing happens to dads. Dr. Darby Saxbe is a neuroscientist and psychologist at USC, and one of the only researchers in the world scanning fathers' brains before and after they have kids. What she found: the same regions that change and

“If I don’t push my kid, they’ll waste their potential.” A lot of us believe this. But is it true? Myleik Teele joins Dr. Becky to work through a question that haunts every ambitious parent. What unfolds is an honest look at whose anxiety is actually running the show — and whether the drive we're trying to install in our kids is something we need to figure out for ourselves first. They get into: w

Dr. Cassidy Freitas grew up watching her mom — a Hispanic judge who fought her way into white male spaces with no margin for error — come home carrying that same no-error version of herself. Her dad pushed straight A's as the path to financial safety. She absorbed all of it. And then she became a mom. She had a plan. A written, formatted, shared-with-her-doctor birth plan. When it fell apart in th

Parents are being sold creativity like it's a subscription box. Workshops, kits, frameworks, scripts: the message being that your kid needs more imagination and it's your job to install it. Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist and Don't Call It Art , has a different take: your kid already has it. The imagination, the playfulness, the willingness to not-know — it's all there. The question i

You and your partner love your kids. So why does it sometimes feel like you're parenting in completely different worlds? In this listener-favorite episode from the Good Inside archives, Dr. Becky talks with a mom named Carmella who feels stuck between two parenting styles: she's the one holding the routines and boundaries, while her husband tends to be more flexible in the moment. The result? More

AI is getting better at sounding human. Better at conversation. Better at reassurance. Better at knowing exactly what we want to hear. So what happens when our kids start building relationships with machines designed to remove friction? In this conversation, Dr. Becky talks with former Wall Street Journal tech columnist Joanna Stern about AI toys, chatbot companions, creativity, learning, and the