#784: Dr. Becky Kennedy — Parenting Strategies for Raising Resilient Kids, Plus Word-for-Word Scripts for Repairing Relationships, Setting Boundaries, and More

Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where for more than a decade, it has been my job to deconstruct world-class performers from different disciplines, all different disciplines to tease out the frameworks, the favorite books.

The routines and in this case the word for words scripts that you can apply to your own lives my guest today is doctor Becky Kennedy she is the founder and CEO of good inside a parenting movement with members in more than one hundred countries that overturns a lot of conventional modern parenting advice.

to actually empower parents to become sturdy, confident leaders. We'll explain what that means and raise sturdy, confident kids. Of course, there are a million people out there giving parenting advice and Dr. Becky Kennedy's advice for thinking on this has resonated.

Incredibly well with me and that is why for years i've wanted to have her on she is the author of the number one best selling book by the same name. Good inside a chart topping podcast good inside with becky you can see the theme here a ted talk with nearly four million views on the power of repair will discuss what that means and what it looks like an upcoming children's book that's my truck. A good inside story about hitting maybe i could use that to.

You can find her online at goodinside.com and on Instagram at Dr. Becky At Good Inside. And now just a few quick words from the people who make this podcast possible.

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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Well, let's start with what popped into my head. Great. And we'll just keep rolling with that thread. Love it. And see if it goes. We're interesting. If it's a dead end, I'll get us out of the dead end. But I want to talk perhaps about your TED Talk on the power of repair. Why do you think this struck a chord with people and what resonated with people from that?

And classic example is you yell at your kid for something, right? So I'll use this example, which is different than the one in my TED talk because it also leads to some, you know, common questions. So my kids stalling in the morning, like, I got to get my kid to school because also when I drop my kid at school, I have to get to work and my kids laid out. I'm like, the whole thing were also rushed. And my kid is saying, you know, I don't know whatever they're saying. I'm not going to school today. You can't make me go to school.

I'm not putting on my shoes. You put on my shoes, and you're thinking, like, I have an eight-year-old. They put on their shoes, right? And then we get to some crescendo moment, whereas a parent, and I'll say, me, myself, because I have this, too. I just yell, scream at my kid. What is wrong with you? You don't do anything. You're eight years old. You're never going to amount to anything in your life. You can't put on your shoes. You're so selfish. You're going to make me late. You turn me into a monster. Why can't you listen the first time?

We say this thing, depending on our kid's temperament, they react in different ways. If they're kind of in the more people pleasing type that immediately stops them, they're like, oh, no, my parents mad at me. I'm going to be good, mostly just because I really need to see that they reflect me that I'm a good kid. I need that. If you have another temperament kid that use this as a way of like, oh, you want to fight, I'll show you a fight. And they're like, I am not putting on my shoes. That was me. That is my third kid, love him. What order are you?

I'm first you're first okay. But i was a pretty defiant look at points and so then you get to the moment you get through it and then i think after drop off there's just like immense heaviness as a parent. You're cycling through different things that again whatever your voices.

might be your own voice or it's probably the voice you've internalized from your own upbringing in terms of how people would have responded to you if you were your kid in that moment. But it's some version of blame. It's either blame in or blame out. It's either I'm an awful parent. Why can't I stay calm and why can't I just get to the morning? And then that usually cycles with Ivan awful kid and my kids a sociopath and they're going to go to jail and they're never going to mount to anything. And either way, you're blaming where repair would be saying to your kid some point.

Hey, I screamed at you earlier. That probably felt scary. And this will be the kind of maybe the start, something controversial. It's never your fault when I yell. And I'm working on staying calmer. So even when I'm frustrated, I can use a calmer voice like I'm sorry. That would be a repair. I'm kind of going back to a moment that felt bad, kind of like reopening that part of the chapter. I'm taking responsibility for my behavior. I'm giving my kid a story to understand what happened.

And I'm kind of talking about what I would do differently the next time.

All right, this is great, Chris, for the mill. And part of the reason we talked about this a little bit before recording, that I was excited to have you on and have a conversation, is that the tools you're talking about really apply everywhere. And they're echoed by a lot of folks. People would not necessarily associate with parenting, like Jocko Willink, Navy Seal Commander, Extreme Ownership. And there are many other examples that I could give where

I feel like what we will discuss in our conversation can be applied many different places, many different dojos for.

very similar tools and toolkits. With that said, I suspect one line where people maybe got stuck and you know exactly what I'm going to say is it's never your fault when I yell at you. All right. Part of me loves that because just to invoke the great name of Jocko, again, who did his first ever podcast, first ever interview on this podcast 100 years ago,

When you own things you give yourself a degree of agency, yes, right, but also overly blaming yourself can be the flip side of maybe taking on excessive responsibility for other people's actions and feelings and so on, meaning sort of codependent or otherwise. So I heard everything you said, but I suppose like some listeners, I was like, always never these absolutes are very strong words. Why say that particular line?

And when I share a script, to me, it's often words that are representative of kind of principles. I never like to get too stuck on words. I actually gave those words an example in part because I think it does bring up a lot of questions. But I never want someone to hear this and think, OK, I got to write down that exact word. In general, take responsibility for your actions, give your kid a story, say what you do differently the next time. And I actually would hope anyone listening would say, I think I have my own brand of that. Amazing. That's better for you and your kid than my brand. So with that in mind, it's never your fault when I yell.

Here's why I think that's powerful, even if you don't say it to discuss and really think about the way we react to our kid. Yes, has to do with the situation in front of us, but we actually react to the set of feelings in our own body combined with the circuitry we have to manage those feelings.

And I think the biggest thing to think about is that circuitry, those skills we have to manage emotions, literally predated our kid's existence. That was there so far before them. Now, when my kid doesn't listen and the morning is delayed, I feel frustrated. And that feeling is definitely co-created with my kid.

Separating frustration from my ability to manage the frustration are two really different things. And telling a kid, basically, you make me yell. You turn me into a monster is actually holding your kid responsible for your set of skills to manage your feelings. And the other reason, and then I'll be quiet for right now, that I think it's so powerful is I think about my son. I don't know. It could be my daughter, whatever. He's married one day, let's say. And he has some partner and I need a really bad day at work.

And he comes home, and for some reason I'm at his house visiting, and his partner is like, oh, man, I forgot to get toilet paper from the store. And then he sits down for dinner. And maybe his partner ordered him the wrong thing. I don't know. He yells at her. And I hear him saying, like, well, if you just got toilet paper and ordered me the right thing, I wouldn't be yelling at you. And I picture the criminal

like seriously. And then we hear ourselves say to our kids all the time, if you just listened the first time, I wouldn't have yelled or like, okay, well, if you were just calmly playing with your sister, then you wouldn't get this reaction from me. And if that creeps us out down the line, like if we wouldn't say I would be so proud to hear my kids say that to a partner, then I don't know why we think that's a good idea to say to our kids when they're young.

So there are many different branches off of this that we could explore. Let's maybe back up or zoom out, choose your favorite metaphor. And perhaps you could just in your supposed framework or worldview, what it means to be a good parent. Could you define this or just speak to that? Yeah. And then we can use that as a sort of a foundation from which we can launch into a bunch of other stuff.

Yeah, I should have a really succinct, really solid answer that question by now, but I- Fortunately, we have a lot of time. Okay. Maybe part of what I struggle with is I think we probably think about that word or that term good parent is like what I'm doing on the surface is something observable. Or I think a core principle that I think about is actually separating kind of who you are in terms of your identity, which is not observable from what you do in your actions, which usually is observable, separating those two.

I mean, but I think a good parent probably sees parenting as a journey of self growth and discovery as much as they see it about anything related to your kid's growth. So I think that's number one. Number two, I think a good parent.

really activates curiosity over judgment in a situation with our kids. And a good parent probably can put into action the idea that really being the sturdiest leader for your kid involves equal parts, very firm boundaries, and parental authority, as it does kind of warm, validating connection.

You mentioned curiosity over judgment. Now, when people hear this for judgment, they probably assume that is a negative judgment, but a judgment could also be something like, good job, right? So what would curiosity look like in place of?

either negative or positive judgment. Yeah, I think the words good job have gotten a lot of press or parents like, you know, so say good job. Say good job. That's not going to do damage to your kid. I think there's a lot we can unpack there. Again, there's deeper principles, right? They're like, oh, what do kids really need when they have accomplishments?

Yeah, I like how you zoom out because it's not the, whether you're using like crayons or the oil paints or the acrylics or charcoal, you have to learn the fundamentals of like drawing. And to do that, you need to learn how to see things. So it's like returning to those first principles. That's right. Right. So exactly right. So.

I think judgment, it can be positive, but I would say, in parenting, actually, in any relationship, it's just so easy to see someone's behavior that feels bad or feels less than ideal. And we just activate our judgment about the behavior. And usually when you judge behavior, what you're unconsciously doing is you're seeing behavior as a sign of who someone is. That's why you're judging it. It's a person such a selfish person.

My friend didn't call me back. Oh, they're so selfish. Or my kid keeps hitting on the playground, even though I say no hitting. And then we don't even realize going to like, what's wrong with my kid? Why have such a bad kid? You know, my kid is never going to figure things out. I'm a bad parent. You just see something on the surface and you kind of feel like you know everything about it. I actually think I never thought about that. That's really what it means to judge something. I see something that's probably part of a larger story. And instead, I think it's the whole thing.

To me, the opposite of judgment in any relationship is curiosity. And I think curiosity is when you see something and you just wonder about it. To me, that's like one of the best words for parents. Wonder. I wonder why my kid is hitting. As soon as you use the word wonder, you're unable to judge because you're thinking and kind of conjuring up this bigger picture. Now, where parents usually go when they hear me say that, it's like, oh, so it's just okay, my kid's hitting.

And there's this, again, judgment we even do there. You must deal with so many people, so many strong opinions. Well, I get it. I have so much empathy for parents and even understand their skepticism of our approach because we have had shoved down our throat, this very, very behavior first, punishment first. We call it discipline. It's actually a joke to me in any other area of life.

If we allowed CEOs and coaches to talk to the people in our organizations, like we think parents do to kids and then we call it disciplined, it would never fly and those people would be fired. But we've had that shoved down our throats. And so anything new always feels uncomfortable. And these are very new ideas. But I think about with other areas, even with kids, if your kid isn't learning how to swim, you teach them how to swim. And nobody says, oh, you just think it's okay that they're not swimming. It's like, oh, we could be like, what? I'm just teaching them how to swim.

So I have a bunch of thoughts on this good job thing. I know that. Let's do it. I like your potential replacements for that. Could you just, just to get people a concrete example, like what might you say instead of a good job? A kid comes to us and let's say they, I don't know, young kid brings us a painting and we could say, oh, good job. It's amazing, right? Or let's say an older kid brings us some paper they wrote and they got a good grade and we say, good job.

Okay, good job does not damage kids, but I think in those moments, we want as parents to kind of double down on building our kids confidence. That's usually the goal we're optimizing for. So then to me, the question is, is that like the best of all options or at least we have other tools in our toolbox? And the thing that really builds kids confidence,

is learning to gaze in before you gaze out. We're in a world that is priming us to gaze out before we gaze in, kind of like, look what I've done. And can someone in the world tell me it slash I am good enough? That's basically the world we live in. And it makes you very empty and very fragile, very, very anxious. I'm talking about social media. Yeah, everything. I mean, so many things, right? Definitely social media. And if I think about this moment, and again, I'm often very long-term thinking, but my kids over and over show me things.

What's going to help them down the road well i know when you're in your twenties and thirties what's really helpful down the road is when you produce something maybe it's art maybe it's a project. Being able to give yourself some estimation of that before others do is very helpful to your whole self concept and protective of anxiety and depression i think i did a good job in this project it's true i didn't hear back from my boss yet but. I'm a little anxious about what my boss is gonna say but the fact that someone didn't tell me something isn't going to spiral me.

And I think about the yearning and the searching and the desperation for a good job. Well, if every time my kid produces something, again, what they wire next to that is someone telling them, good job.

Then they go into the world unable to give themselves that type of validation and searching for someone to say they're good enough. So what do I like better? Anything that helps your kid share more about themselves actually ends up feeling better to your kid also. So I think about, you know, a little while ago, my daughter paint stuff and she did, she gave me this painting. It was a horrible artist. So anything she does is amazing. But what I said to her first, it said, Oh, tell me about the painting. Like, what made you pick red there?

She told me this whole story, this whole story about how she hasn't ever really seen a red police car, and whatever it was, she shared her story with me. Same thing I'm thinking about a kid giving us a paper. Oh, how do you think could have come up with that topic?

What made you start it that way? What was it like writing that? Whatever the questions are. I know it sounds like annoying at first. I get it because I'm paranoid. Can I just say good job? Of course you can. But then I go to an adult example. Let's say to me we did your house and I visited.

and you really worked hard on it. And I came and go, oh, I love your house. Good job. It's actually kind of a conversation ender. I feel like you would say to me, thank you. But if instead I said, how did you pick that color wall with that couch? You would, oh, okay. Well, let me tell you and let me show you my Pinterest board or whatever it was. And even if I never said good job, I bet you would feel more lit up inside and almost better than if I had just kind of ended the conversation that way.

Yeah, for sure. I have a number of friends. I mean, I have a lot of friends with kids, but one who comes to mind, I'm not going to name him, but he's very good at this and one of the best learners of any skill I've ever met. He's just an incredible human.

The other thing that he did, and this was even prior to books like grit, I think that's Angela Duckworth, but instead of saying, good job, another thing he would do is say something, I'm making this up as an example, but he would be like, I'm so proud of you. You work so hard on that to reinforce the effort, the process over the outcome. That's right.

which seems to make sense right and you're not suggesting your path is the one only toolkit of purity and redemption in the sense that it can combine with other things. But the first principles are adaptable as long as you understand what those principles are.

Yeah, I think that every parent, like some percentage of the time be like, great job. That's cool. That's awesome. Okay. But those questions process over product, asking for a kid's story, asking them to tell you, once you get started, it's easier. And yes, it actually focuses on what's more in a kid's control and then setting up your kids to feel good about themselves, even if they're not always getting 100.

is just such a massive privilege and it actually makes them work harder because they're focused on their effort and process instead of just on a result.

What is your opinion of parents focusing or viewing their job as making their kids happy? Optimizing for happiness, right? Because who's going to poo poo happiness? I mean, it's someone's... I don't know. I don't know. All right, so let's wade into the deep waters. It's something people say as a throwaway comment. Like my husband always jokes, like, you're out like a dinner party. So I was like, you just want your kids to be happy, right? And I'll look at me and think, Becky, please don't ruin this perfectly nice moment. Don't take it. Don't take the babe. And I always do.

No, I very much would say a parent's job is not to make it happy. And again, because we struggle to hold multiplicity, people will say, you want your kids to be unhappy? No, I definitely don't try to make my kids unhappy. Can I just stop to say you're not like this, maybe like, why are people so stupid and just like want to fight? It's like, obviously you don't mean that.

We think in these extremes. We see that in all areas and holding two things as true or holding nuance is increasingly hard in this world, which is why it's even more important to kind of have some of these ideas in our homes. So you use the word optimizing and I think about that a lot. So zooming out against again about kind of good insight in general, as I would say, our parenting approach is just very long term greedy because I just think my kids are going to be out of my house for way longer than they're in my house.

They're going to choose whether they want to be in a relationship with me way longer than they're locked into a relationship with me. And however high the stakes feel when they're eight and 10 and 17, we know the stakes in life just get higher. And so when we think about making our kids happy, what we're actually saying is I am prioritizing my kid's short term ease. I am making my kid's life easy and comfortable in the short term.

And what ends up happening not when you do that a couple times as a pattern is you actually narrow the range of emotions, kids believe they can cope with 100% for sure true partnerships to true yes, anyway, a lot of relationships you end up having adults who are remarkably anxious so prioritizing happiness for kids leads to adulthood full of a ton of anxiety.

Because you're protecting them from a broader band of emotional exposure, and so they don't develop the confidence that they can handle those broader ranges. I have to sometimes use hyperbolic language with myself to really get me to do something that's hard, but I think good for my kids. Like I see my kid who's left out of a social event, or who got the school project in a group where all of his friends are together, and my kid is the only one not with his friends. So where my kid is struggling to do a puzzle,

And one of the things I say to myself is, Becky, do not deprive my child of finding their capability. Do not steal it. Do not steal their capability. A kid doesn't feel capable when they do something easy.

A kid doesn't even feel capable when they're doing something hard. Kids develop capability after watching themselves survive something that was really difficult and just get through it. And so if I say to my kid, I'll call the school and I'll switch the school group for you. Oh, I'll do that puzzle for you because I just don't want to deal with you having a meltdown. Not once, but over and over. I'm actually stealing their capability.

Capability really is the antidote to anxiety and going forward when I think about my kids going into the world. What's more important than feeling like I can be capable in a wide range, not very narrow, bubbled cushion range of situations. What does it mean to be a sturdy leader?

I love the word sturdy, like there's certain words I love because even though I'm a psychologist and I have a lot of words to say, I actually think very visually. And to me, the words that make sense evoke an emotion that I can access. The word sturdy just does that for me. And again, I think sturdy leadership is what we want in a CEO. So we want a partner. So we want in a coach, it's definitely what we want in a pilot. So does that mean reliable, dependable,

I think there's a couple ways. I think it's a leader who is equally bound read as they are connected to you. They're actually equally as connected to themselves. What do I want? What are my values? What are my limitations as they are able to connect to you? Oh, you might be different, but I'm able to hear and understand your values and wants and feelings.

And to me, the way that can get kind of operationalized as a kind of really set of skills is you know how to set boundaries. And I think most people get boundaries completely wrong. So I know how to set and hold boundaries. And at the same time, I'm able to connect to and validate other people's emotional experiences. Those are the two pillars of sturdy leadership.

Could you paint a scenario for us? You have great scripts and people come to you for script. It doesn't have to be a verbatim script, but could you just walk us through a hypothetical situation that exemplifies someone being sturdy in this way? Yes. I think sometimes the best way to do it is actually in this pilot metaphor. Can I do that first and then I'll come to us? Let's get into the pilot. Okay. Are you actually a pilot? It won't surprise me. I'm not a pilot. I have landed a plan, but I'm not a pilot.

I'm sorry right there. Okay. I'm definitely not the sturdy pilot. So I'm definitely not a pilot. You know, you're a passenger on a flight and there's, let's say a lot of turbulence and you're very scared. And maybe even you look around and everyone's pretty scared. I think there's three versions of a pilot that you might hear come over the loudspeaker. And I actually think they perfectly exemplify three different versions of parenting. So here's pilot one.

Everyone stop screaming. You're making a big deal out of nothing, and I can't focus, and you ruin everything, and you're just gonna all of your frequent flyer miles taken away if you keep screaming. Something like that. Not super reassuring. Not reassuring. And the invalidation there, as a passenger for me, almost makes me worried. This is a pilot not knowing, turbulent, and oh my goodness, me screaming and being scared.

is enough to make the pilot kind of freak out at me. Like that actually doesn't feel good. It feels like I was contagious to the pilot and they couldn't handle the situation. Okay, that's pilot one. That's like when we say to her kids, if you don't listen to me the next time you're losing dessert, you're so rude, you can't hit your sister and you ruin every family vacation, whatever, we kind of just scream at our kids and we threaten things. That by the way, we never follow up on and we just do a lot of punishment because we don't really know what to do. That's pilot one. Pilot two.

It's almost the opposite extreme. Everyone's scared and you're right. It is really turbulent. I don't know. I'm just going to open up the cockpit door. If any of you know how to pilot the plane, just come on in and take over. At this point, you're no longer scared of turbulence and you're just terrified that this person is your pilot because there's this merger. My overwhelm became your overwhelm and you just melted in front of me. That is so scary.

The pilot we want to hear is the sturdy leader. And they'd probably say something like this. I hear you screaming. That makes sense. It's very turbulent. And I've done this a million times. I know what I'm doing. What scares you does not scare me. And so I'm going to get off the loudspeaker and go back to piloting the plane. And I'll see you on the ground in Los Angeles.

And what's crazy is I think you think about a passenger in that situation and I'm going to guess even if the turbulence was the same, they feel calmer because what a sturdy leader really does is they say to you, I see what's happening for you. I see your feelings as real.

And your feelings don't overwhelm me. There's a boundary. I can see yours as real and connect to them while I can maintain a separate connection for myself. And there's kind of this cockpit between us. That's like saying to your kid, oh, you know, they're having a meltdown because you say no to ice cream for breakfast, right? And you say, oh, you really wanted ice cream for breakfast. I get it. Oh, yummy.

And that's not an option, sweetie. You can have a waffle, you can have cereal, let me know when you want to make a decision. And when I model that, parents will say it's not working. It's not working. I'm like, what do you mean it's not working? Well, my kids still screams. I'm just thinking about my pilot saying, I announcement didn't work.

My passengers are still scared of the turbulence. Can you imagine? Who cares? Like in a way that they're still scared. Their reaction is not a barometer for whether you are doing a good job and defining it that way can get into real role confusion, can get us into a lot of trouble. What do you mean by role confusion?

Well, I think every parent wants to do a good job, but over and over when I talk to parents and their kids are tantrum all the time and they're rude, whatever it is, I'll say to them, what is your job in this situation? And all of them say, I have no idea. But again, I go to the workplace and I imagine someone I could inside, like as a company showing up,

And me as CEO saying, I do a good job today. And I'm saying, but I don't have a job description. I'd be like, do a good job. Becky, I cannot do a good job if I don't know what my job is. And I need to know what that person's job is. So I know what they're doing versus what I'm doing. That's totally fair. So I think as a parent, if you don't know what your job is,

You can't do a good job. And what role confusion, what I mean by that is number one, you don't have clarity on your job. Because I think any parent listening to this, if you think about any tricky situation, my kid's rude, my kid's not sleeping, my kid's lying, what is my job in the situation? If you don't know that with clarity, that's at least your starting point. And often, as parents, we ask our kid to do our job for us.

What would you offer as a sample job description? Almost always, our jobs are those two things. Setting boundaries. Boundaries are limits we set, they're decisions we make, and sometimes, especially when our kids are younger, they're truly, they're physical. They're stopping my kid from running into the street or picking my kid up and leaving the park because they're having a meltdown, even though my kid doesn't want to be doing that. Those are boundaries.

The other side is always seeing the good kid under the bad behavior and connecting to my kid in that way. Here's a good example. I hear all the time, my kid isn't listening to anything. My kid isn't listening to anything I say. For example, my kid is jumping on the couch right near a glass table.

Get off the couch, stop jumping on the couch, and they don't listen. I say stop jumping on the couch. And then I say, if you don't get off the couch by the time I count to three, I'm going to take away your dessert. And then I don't really take away the desserts. I don't want to melt down later that night. This is so common. Sounds like a mess. Right. It's a mess. So number one, I would say, what is your job?

Again, I think they would say, I'm doing my job. I'm trying to get my kid off the couch. But you're asking your kid to do your job for you. You're watching your kid not able to make a good decision. This is your kid who you like. And instead of helping them be safe, you're asking them to do something they're showing you they can't do. So what would you potentially do? Great. So let's start. I can't even answer that without saying what's a boundary. Because that parent, I would say, is not setting boundaries. And this is true separate from kids.

Is it fair to think about boundaries as rules you follow consistently or as I guess it's probably more nuanced? Um, I mean, I guess I think it's fair to say, but I would say it's not the most actionable, helpful definition. Okay. So, to me, my definition of boundaries, boundaries are things you tell people you will do and they require the other person to do nothing.

That's a really important dual kind of definition. It's something I tell, let's say it's my kid, although it could be your colleague or anyone, it's what I tell my kid, I will do. That's an assertion of my power. It's what I will do. I'm not letting my day be ruined by my four-year-old not listening. I just like myself and my kid too much to do that. So boundary is something I tell my kid, I will do. And it's success requires my kid to do nothing. Get off the couch, get off the couch. I'm not telling my kid what I will do.

And it requires them to do something to be successful. It's a complete giving away of your power. Right. Versus, and this surprises people because too often I think good inside we get lumped in with like soft permissive parenting. This is zero percent permissive.

Setting a boundary and validating my kid's feelings, being sturdy would sound like this. Once I tell my kid, hey, get off the couch. They don't. I'd say, look, I'm going to walk over to you. And if by the time I get there, you're not off the couch, I will put my arms around you. I'll pick you up. I'll put you on the floor because my number one job is to keep you safe. And it's just not safe to, you know, jump into your, that glass table. Okay.

Now, in my own house, when my kids were younger, I'd go over to my kid and people have this illusion. So you do this and then your kid just gets off the couch. No, no, they don't. You do this. You get over there. If you have a normal child, they're going to look at you in the eye and keep jumping up and down, not because I don't respect you just because I haven't learned how to control their impulses yet. So then I would do my job. I would put my arm. Okay. I'm going to pick you up now. I'm going to put them on the ground.

They will not look at you and say thank you for your story show amazing i really needed that thank you for saying no they will scream, but actually when you understand this kind of parents job. Visual you set a boundary every time you set a boundary your kids can get upset until they get a little more used to it.

But that's because when you set a boundary, you're basically just telling your kid you can't do something you want to do. Humans feel upset when they're stopped from doing things they want to do all the time. They get upset and it actually allows you to do the second part of your job. So I pick my kid up, they scream, no, put me down. I hate you whatever they say in the state. And then I can say, oh, you really want to jump on the couch. You really don't want to jump on the floor. It's so boring. Again, when I say that,

That doesn't mean for one instant that I let my kid back on the couch what they will try to do. And my hands will be ready to block them. Nope, I'm not going to let you do that. This is where I think it really is this revolutionary idea in any relationship. I can be equally strong and equally connected to someone else. And that's true sturdiness and really doing our job.

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I want to ask you about perhaps another facet of doing your job, but you can't trust everything you read on the Internet, so I will ask this question in the following way. This is from a participant in one of your workshops, and they described your approach as one of, quote, coaching and nervous system to cope with being human in the world, end quote. Is that a fair description?

what we do. Yeah, or would you say, not quite close, but what I love about that is it captures something that's so much more true than why most people initially come to us. They come to us because their kids are having tantrums, their kids aren't sleeping, their kids are being rude, their kids are being defiant.

And what they end up getting is they themselves get rewiring to be sturdier in the world while they learn how to give that to their kids from the start. So I think that that's close. Yeah, I mean, it's referring back to what I mentioned earlier in this conversation. It's really simpatico with so many other things that I've been exposed to, but it seems like

with good inside. And the child is, yes, you're interacting with a child. Yes, one of the objectives is to become a better parent and be more connected and be a sturdy leader. And your child is also a mirror and a medium through which you get to work on yourself. Because if you're dysregulated, guess what? How can you expect your kid to be regulated? And some people are going to hate this because I recognize that human children are not dogs, but

For instance, there's a great book. There's so many terrible books on dog training, but one which has terrible title, unfortunately, called Don't Shoot the Dog is written by Karen Pryor. She took clicker training from marine mammals and brought it over to shaping behavior with dogs. So clicker training is when you click to reward a certain behavior or getting directionally

Moving towards the right behavior and then you're able to sort of time mark that offer war, but the reason I'm bringing this up is not that you use clicker training with humans. I've tried that as a joke. It generally lands really poorly, but rather she reinforces over and over again.

Why most dog problems are actually owner problems and you need to be consistent if you are trying to ship behavior you also need to be very consistent with and i know this might open up some debate but.

rewards, generally not punishments in her approach. It's almost all positive reinforcement. And when I see, for instance, I mean, she's not here today, but I have a very well trained dog and I have some tolerance for the monotony of dog training and I find it very soothing actually, but

when i see dogs that are misbehaving because they were never trained early on and then their owners are freaking out maybe hitting them being really abusive i'm like that is an owner problem that's not a dog problem and i have to imagine they're probably, similar examples parenting in their must be.

My oldest son said something once that I don't think he meant to be as profound, but it's something that sticks with me a lot and it goes kind of problem blame where we're in a situation in the car and essentially my husband thought my son had closed the door and he didn't and kind of backed out the car and the car got caught in the garage with the door. Anyway, and he kind of said, saying, my son and my son just said, it's not my fault. And my husband said, so it's my fault.

And my son said, I think he was, I don't even know, eight at the time, he goes, you know, sometimes bad things happen and it's nobody's fault. And I think for parents, this is always true. Like when your kid is really struggling, is it a kid's fault? Is it a parent's fault? Like we're obsessed with fault. Why is it anybody's kind of fault? I always say to parents, it's not your fault, your kids struggling in the way they are, fault's just not a useful framework. You are the leader of your home. And if all the associates

in some big company, you know, we're struggling. I don't think you would start an intervention at the associate level. Leadership would say, okay, not our fault, but like where are the leaders? So what are we going to do? And I, yeah. It's not your fault, but it's your responsibility. Exactly. And the other thing is, I think when we become parents, it's not just like our kids' problems are our fault or our problems, but I see a much more hopeful framework where through your kids, if you want to take this on as a journey, you will learn everything you ever needed to know about yourself.

your own childhood. By the way, you watch your partner's childhood play out. You're like, oh, that's how you were raised. I see it now. And there's so much learning, right? And that's hard. Learning is hard. Growth is hard. And it is kind of this amazing opportunity rather than my kid's problem being my fault or my problem. He'd be like, there is an opportunity for everyone here. What is the MGI? Hmm. I love a good acronym. So,

When I was in my clinical psychology PhD program, I'd always hear these amazing people speak and I'd go with my classmates, be like, that was amazing. And I say, yes, it's amazing. But what are we going to do about it? Maybe like, what do you mean? Just think about it. I really don't love thoughts without actions. I just like to know, okay, what do I do? How do I action on this great idea? And to me, this idea that

your kid, all of us, we are good inside identity separate from behavior. It's a very powerful idea, but I don't find it as actionable as I would like. So to me, the way to action on that idea is this idea of MGI. And to me, this is something in all of our relationships, even if it's just after the fact, at the end of the day, we can ask ourselves, an MGI just stands for most generous interpretation. What is the most generous interpretation I can come up with?

of my kid's behavior, of my colleagues' behavior, my teammates' behavior. Because I think what happens naturally is we default to the LGI, the least generous interpretation. So you see your kid, they lie to your face once, no, I didn't take KitKat's from, I didn't eat before dinner and they were like chocolate all over. And it's just so easy. You just go to like, my kid is a sociopath, my kid doesn't respect me. I'm like, well, my kid ate a KitKat. And like all of a sudden, this is a matter of like respecting me.

Or, you know, my kid is hitting. They're in a hitting stage. And again, we just go to, my kid is never going to have any friends. My kid is clingy. They're always going to be the loser at parties and they're never going to be able to converse with anyone. And then what happens and why the LGI is so almost dangerous is it makes us do this fast forward error. We take a situation today, we fast forward to what that means about our kid, I don't know, 20 years from now. And then we respond in the moment based on all of that fear.

rather than what's just going on in the moment. And MGI really shakes us out of that. What is the most generous interpretation of why my kid would lie to my face?

Whenever I ask parents that, it's amazing. They're countenance goes from like so angry at their four year old. They're like, oh, they're probably scared of my reaction. Okay. And then eventually if you're like, what do I do? But the mindset we're in in life determines the interventions we use. And I can promise you as long as you're in an LGI mindset with your kid,

your partner, with your colleague, zero productive things can happen. And then we say, what do I do? What do I do? The answer is to stop doing from that mindset and ask yourself a different question to get in a more productive mindset and then intervene from there.

So we're meeting for the first time. We have a lot of mutual friends. It turns out, but I have this suspicion that we have a fair amount of shared DNA just in terms of how we operate. And as you're mentioning the thoughts as being interesting, but not that interesting. If there's no action to apply these thoughts, I thought that might be a useful place for segue.

So I read that you're a planner and that your husband gave you some advice around planning. Is this enough of a cue to a prompt? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I need more. All right. So this is from romper romper.com. Yeah. And so this is the journalist.

Speaking, I tend to catastrophize to jump to the worst case scenario and we're struggling with a difficult phase or unpleasant pattern, but I tell myself to have faith to believe that we will work ourselves to a better place. And then this is, I believe, quoting you, I'm guessing you're a planner, she responds. I'm a planner too. My husband said to me over the pandemic, I never thought of planners as pessimists.

But the opposite of planning is not catastrophe is being able to say to yourself, I'll figure it out no matter what happens. The opposite of catastrophizing isn't predicting the good, it's saying to yourself, I'll find my feet, I'll be able to cope with what comes my way. So this is a roundabout way of asking what historically or currently have been your biggest challenges in parenting. That could be with your kids, it could be with your

Husband could be other, but what comes to mind? It's a great segue and that is true where my husband said to me when I, you know, during the pandemic, I kind of started this whole part of my career and I kind of versed in these like creative thoughts where I became much less organized and I had all this creativity and at the same time, the pandemic was very hard to me and this relates to.

One of the things that's hard for me in parenting and one of the things I talk about a lot. So people probably think I'm good at it, but I talk about it all the time. So I'm bad at it. That's why anybody talks about things all the time where he's like, wow, I think I didn't marry like a very logical optimist. I think I married like a creative pessimist. I'm like, look at this. Creative pessimist.

I think i'm short term pessimistic yes long term optimistic and what i mean by that is i love a plan i love an action people outside of me will be like becky is one of the most productive people i know and i think that's probably true on the surface. But the driver of that is incredibly anxious.

When I want to do something and haven't yet done it that the way I really my own anxiety is just to do it so it looks productive, but it's probably just an anxiety coping skill. And what that means is when I want to do something or there's a struggle and I can't get action on it ever really hard time. What would be an example of that?

I mean, all during COVID in terms of, I think one of the reasons I probably, in some ways it was like, oh, you were like there for me in COVID and I produced so much content as I just like needed something to do because the pause of that slowness, like there's not a lot to do to fix this. You just kind of have to be in it. It's really, really hard for me.

Another example of that is I think about my kids and they're now 7, 10, and 13. So each of them, they go to these stages and maybe some social shifts or harder stages. And I think I talk so much about sitting with feelings and not fixing them because my first instinct for sure is to just go in and make it better, make them happy.

And that is something, again, the parallel process of learning to just sit with my own feelings. All of us who can be prone to action, there's a morality to it, it's like a better thing, and it can be better in some circumstances, but sometimes the best thing to do is just sit with it. And that is something I think I have worked on in myself even through working on it with my kids.

In addition to your book, good inside a guide to becoming the parent you want to be, which has been recommended to me by multiple close friends, even though I don't have kids. In addition to that, what other books or modalities do you think could be helpful for someone in relationship?

End or with kids. For instance, a few come to mind, right? There's a book called conscious loving. I think it's by gay and Katie Hendrix. I always mix up the Hendrix because there are two pairs. There's non-violent communication. Great book. There is, I think I mentioned extreme ownership, which it does actually overlap.

In certain ways, you have, I believe, a quote from Dick Schwartz, internal IFS, internal family systems. For people interested, I did a live session with him on this podcast, which got very interesting, very, very quickly fascinating, practitioner, really useful system. Anything else come to mind? Any books, resources, anything at all that you would add to that list?

The three books, I guess, that are top of mind would be, yeah, Stickshwarts is no bad parts or just his internal family systems book. I mean, he knows I've been very influenced by him when I work with adults in therapy. And to me, some of the best gifts and privileges we can give our kids is helping them understand the parts of themselves and talk to their parts as kids. Like, when I hear my kids do that,

I always think this is going to help you more when you go to college than anything you learn. It's cold, it's crazy. So, IFS, Eve Rodske's book, Fair Play.

I don't know that is I think so powerful, especially for parents who feel like they're the default parent, meaning they're the parent who maybe their partner takes the kid to soccer, but realizing they have to be signed up for soccer, thinking about what soccer, where to sign up, getting them the shin guards, getting them the new cleats that actually fit and are the ones they want.

That idea of mental load, the mental load of parenting is so intense. She really helps put a word, words in a system to that, but I think it makes a lot of parents saying, oh my God, I'm not crazy. Like this is a thing, this is a system. Why is it called fair play?

Because it's the idea that if you have a partnership, that you don't have to distribute tasks 50-50, but that the mental load has a disproportionate impact on your stress and overwhelm, and there needs to be more fair play amongst teammates in that way. Got it.

And then this might sound, you know, like an odd recommendation, but Cheryl Strade's tiny, beautiful things. Cheryl is someone I also wonder, like, do I share DNA with her where I'll read things she writes in there and I think, oh, my goodness, did I steal her thought? I swear I say this in my book. And she has said to me, no, I've always, I worry, I plagiarized. You know, my book came out for your book. And it's very interesting. I'm just hearing my own three suggestions and none of them have to do with kids, but maybe that's super fascinating. Maybe that's my, you know, revealing something.

To me, the things we need to learn for our kids when we're parenting, if I think about a strategy or what to do with my kid, it's like something I put on a shelf. That's important. When you open a closet door, you need the things on the shelf to take that are actually useful and feel right and move things forward. But what I hear from parents all the time is, I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm memorizing, but in the moment, I just scream at my kid. And then they say, what's wrong with me? To me, you need the key to the door.

That is the closet that has that shelf, right? Like if you can- Can you explain that one more time? Like if all of your parenting strategies are on a shelf in a closet, and there's a door to the closet, and in the moment, you're like, I want to get that strategy. You need to be able to access it. You have to be able to access it.

And so for any parent listening, it's like, that is so me. I know the thing I want to say, but then I just scream my head off at my kid. I would actually say, stop learning parenting strategies. You have enough on that shelf. For now, what I would focus on are my triggers. What is happening with my kid that I am triggered? And I am at a 10 out of 10. And when you're at a 10 out of 10, nobody has a key to any lock. Yeah. Strategy is not going to be forthcoming.

No, the strategies you need have a lot more to do with you, not because it's your fault. And the beauty is when you work on those strategies where you're triggered with your kid,

Guess what? If you're triggered when your kid's whining, it's not the whining. It's probably the fact that whining generally represents helplessness. I would guess if that's a particularly triggering situation, helplessness was very shamed in your own family. It was probably a pull up your bootstraps kind of family. If you're crying, I'll give you something to cry about family. So you had to shut down your helplessness because it was dangerous. You see it in your kid and you respond to them in the same way people responded to you. Okay, that's like a lot of therapy in 30 seconds. But let's say that's true.

Are people like, wow, that's weird. That's very true. You can memorize everything you want to say to your kid. But if you don't, and IFS is hugely helpful here, hugely helpful in my re-parenting approach and trigger approach, if you don't get to know your protector parts and you don't do that type of work, then every time when that happens, that part is going to scream out. So the answer to showing up as the parent you want to be is this combination of, yes, I have to put the things on the shelf, but I have to know how to open the door also.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So what advice would you give me since I'm currently wife slash partner hunting? I would like to have a family, but would like to hit some prereqs. It's technically biologically not that hard to have kids, but I would like to have to build a family together adventure, yep, like to have that version if possible.

For people out there who are single but would love to have a family, what advice might you give them in terms of positive indicators for people who will be leaning towards some of the abilities and self awareness and skills that make for a sturdy leader parent.

But I was like, hey, here's my dossier of like 10 prospects. And you're like, well, let's like ask a few questions and study leadership on the list. One second, I'm assessing you for 30 liters. You're pretty sturdy leadership. They're like, oh, dirty talks. Seriously. Seriously. Talk about that one in our next episode.

So a couple of things. To me, again, being a sturdy leader has nothing to do with being a parent. And while I think it's actually through parenting, and this is the beauty that people have such in their face the work they need to do that they can access that, you're right in pointing out how amazing you're doing something this work before.

So I think number one, again, curiosity over judgment to me is very, very key for any sturdy leader at any age. So when you're dating people, you know, when you're friends with people and in general, they hear something that's happening for you and they're more curious and they are judgmental. Oh, I did this thing. I had this awful interview. Oh, what happened? Tell me about that. Or you even hear that they approach their own life that way where people who have really intense, rigid judgments about

Anyone, they tend to be that way with others because they tend to be that way with themselves. And then that's going to be activated probably with kids. This number one, to me, I think tolerance for inconvenience. It's like a really important part of sturdy leadership, especially with kids.

How might you suss that out? I mean, you can go on like traveling trip and see how they handle baggage, being delayed or whatever. I mean, you can try to engineer it that way, but any other way. I think it probably comes up in our life all the time. Like, I don't know how much we're always optimizing for convenience versus like, yeah, let's take this up. It'll take us a little longer, but like it's easy enough for, oh, there's a way to do a restaurant. I really want to go there. Okay. Can I tolerate that? Or, oh, I really want to go. I was just invited to this party. It's going to be so cool. I already committed.

to my friends and this kind of not quote, cool, but random group dinner and like, you know what, I'm gonna miss that party. This is like my best friend's birthday party, whatever it is. Because I think that's one of the things with parenting that people don't talk about enough. It's massively inconvenient. That's really the word I think about all the time. I show up, I'm trying to grocery shop, my forials having a tantrum and it's just like, that's inconvenient that I've spent 10 minutes now dealing with that. I want to be able to finish my grocery shopping. I also think in a relationship

the ability to be curious about your experience and not see that as any reflection on their own experience, which is really the ability to hold multiplicity. Like when you say to a partner, like, I was really upset you didn't text me back. Probably over the partner is their first reaction might be like, I wouldn't have been upset in that situation or whatever. Are you saying I'm a bad person or we get very defensive because we find someone's experience of us to be counter of our experience of ourselves.

And if we're very secure and sturdy, we'd be able to say to ourselves, okay, I can know what my intention was and I'm not threatened by the fact that Tim was upset, but I didn't text him back. I can be curious about it. Be like, oh, tell me more about that. Oh, oh, I see that. And I don't see that as like a threat to myself. That to me is probably the ultimate indicator because that happens all the time.

I would love to ask you a few questions that one of my employees said. She's a toddler. In every instance that I've seen, she tries very hard to be. How are she defines it? Good parent. I think maybe this conversation will lead her to think about the definition differently, but she sent a bunch of very good questions.

And we probably won't have time for all of them. She really took my question and my producer's question seriously, I should say. So she has eight questions, but I want to hop to number eight. This is about grandparents.

Does Dr. Becky have any good tips on parenting our parents? Our quote unquote boomer parents often use guilt and shame as teaching methods, which we don't love or approve of. But how do we effectively introduce more positive ways they can grandparent our children when they're together or babysitting for us? This question could also apply to someone's partner, right? If someone reads your book, they think it's fantastic. They want to embrace it, but their partner maybe has a heavy-handed, reactive way of handling things or

Yes. Fill in the blank. They're skeptical. Right. So maybe you could speak to the grandparents, and maybe that will also speak to the partner question, although they're different dynamics. They're related and different. The grandparent one is a great one because I think there's a lot to unpack there. So if she was here, I'd first probably ask her questions about what it's like for her to parent in a way that's different from, it seems like what her parents think is right. I actually think that's a core.

what it feels like for her. Yeah, what it's like for her. I mean, I think that what happens when you have kids and grandparents are involved is we don't even realize how much unconsciously we're just looking for them to tell us we're doing a good job. And most parents parent differently than their parents did. Most grandparents find that to be almost a criticism of how they parented. And so they're interested in criticizing their kids almost as a way of making themselves feel better. And then as the parent, we don't even realize we're back to being five years old.

and being like, doing a good job. And the whole thing becomes very, very toxic. To me, the most liberating thing when you're an adult, and it's just an idea, obviously, it takes a little get emotionally there, is I don't need my parents' approval. I remember when I realized that, it's actually amazing. I just changed my life in so many ways. We won't lose track of the grandparents' question, but was there a capitalizing event, conversation, revelation,

There actually was, I just remember going through my dating life and dating people that my parents would have some things to say about. I have not to have any majorly toxic relationships, but they had opinions. I just remember one day thinking, the way it came up my head is they're not dating this person.

There was an eye. I think there was a boundary. This, like, I'm in the cockpit. They can be chirpy passengers. But that's actually what they are. And by the way, I love my parents. They're incredible. And I think realizing that, and this is the thing, when you're a parent, realizing that about your own parents only serves to make your relationship better.

Because when you're unconsciously looking for their approval, you get frustrated, you tend to show up in really confusing ways to your kids. You start to do weird things with your kids in front of your parents, almost trying to bridge this gap between how I parent and how my parents want me. And I can't really, who is my parent? They're doing all this weird stuff that they never do. And then we really lose ourselves. So what I would actually say here, which sounds odd, and it's probably not that dissimilar to what I'd start with.

with a partner, although I think the dynamic is different with parents is the first step is actually trying to figure out what do I believe in in my parenting? The sturdier you are in your boundaries, the easier it is to deal with pushback. And in fact, the opposite is true with boundaries. The more I seek approval for my boundaries, the weaker my boundaries become.

And so that's where I would actually start. So let's say, oh, I wish my parents understood my kids tantrums the way I try to understand them. And instead, my parents tend to say, why aren't you sending Bobby to his room? You know, you have a bad kid or whatever they say. Yeah, or if they're babysitting, they just do that.

That's right. But even those conversations are so much easier to have once you've really grounded yourself in what you believe because then the conversation becomes less emotional and here's then how I would handle it after that.

how I'm handling Bobby's meltdowns, I think it's different than what comes natural to you. We have a couple options. I'm happy to go through it and why. I'm also happy if you don't really care about the why. Just share how I would like you to respond. That's in line with the way we're doing things, because given you spend a good amount of time with him, it's just confusing for him to hear things so differently.

I know you probably don't approve, or at least it's going to feel weird because it's so new. And this stuff really matters to me. And then I don't know how egregious it is. Again, is it just different? Is it terrifying? We want to differentiate. But the conversation is kind of me and my parent even are on the same team.

And that conversation, I have a lot more to say about being on the same team versus oppositional teams, that's a lot easier to have if I'm less caught up in probably what's happening unconsciously, which is trying to get them to kind of tell me that I'm doing a good job at my kid.

Let me bring up one other question of hers, and I may bring up more, but partially because it also bridges to a question that I had. This is a question about parenting toddlers could apply to all sorts of ages. Is it okay to tell my toddler that I'm upset by her behavior? For example, if she's whining and complaining about getting buckled into the car, and I've tried to stay calm, but it goes on for so long that I get frustrated,

Is it okay to say that I am frustrated by her behavior and I need to break or what is the best response to avoid guilt and shaming language. Because I was thinking reflecting on the example you gave of the kid jumping on the couch. And I could very easily see myself like I've done the work done the IFS got the key to the closet.

And I go through the routine, right? I set the boundary. If I walk over there and you're still on the couch, but calm, calm, calm. Then I put them down and they scream their face off. They somehow juke me and get back on the couch. Maybe I do it a second time, but by this point, my blood pressure is a little higher.

by like rep number three, like there's a point where if it's like rep number 20, like there's a rep at which anyone will probably kind of break. So I guess my question is, but we can tackle, I want to answer her question because she was generous enough to send the questions. Is it okay to tell my kid that I'm upset or let me get her language?

Frustrated, I think she said. Right. Is it okay to say that I'm frustrated by her behavior and that I need a break, et cetera, et cetera? What is the best response to avoid guilt and shaming language? My broader question is, what do you do, let's say in the jumping on the couch example, when you've done the right thing two or three times and the kid is just helping. Still being difficult. Yeah. So a couple of parts of that question. Number one,

There's this thing about, I hear it, I have never said, like, you can't tell your kids how you feel. There's all these, like, random things people ingest. I don't even know who said that, but I think I'm not supposed to do it to not get, you know, whenever you're- The Ten Commandments. But I would say, whenever as a parent you're repeating advice to yourself, where you can't even name the person who said that, it's a pretty good start. Just like, I'm not going to let that take up too much space in my head. You know, if I don't even know the name of the person who I trust enough to let that live in my head. Oscar Wilde. Exactly. Abraham Lincoln.

There's a big difference between saying to your kid, hey, I'm really frustrated. I'm taking a breath, taking a break, I'll be back and saying, you make me yell at you. Stop doing that. That makes mommy so sad.

The insinuation that we say aloud that your kid, your three-year-old is making you feel something is actually especially toxic for kids who are kind of rebellious, who already kind of struggle because they know, like, I'm a little more powerful in my family dynamic. People are a little scared of me. And now my parent is confirming that as a three-year-old, I have the power

to make her feel a certain way. I think we say, because we're so desperate and we're like, nothing's worked. Will this work? But again, we all say all the things and then we repair and try to do a little bit of the next day, but I'm not such a fan. But what that has got kind of misconstrued as is never telling your kids how you feel. They're totally different. Saying to your kid, that's a great thing to say. Hey, I'm getting heated. I need a break. And then I think it's helpful to say to a kid,

I love you. I'll be back because kids are so attuned evolutionarily to attachment and therefore to proximity and kind of, quote, abandonment that a kid can feel like, Oh, did I like make my parent go away? So hey, I'm feeling frustrated. I need a moment. It's actually such beautiful self care. I'm going to go to my room. I'm going to take some breaths and I'll be back.

You know, connect with you again in a few minutes or whatever it is. And that's especially powerful. What I want to tell parents listening, if you know you're someone, you get reactive, you kind of get to the point where you boil over such powerful thing to say to your kid to preview to them before. Hey, I'm going to start doing something different going forward.

Know how sometimes you got upset i get upset and then kind of there's like this big screaming moment. I'm really invested as a parent and trying to have that happen less just keep a calmer home and one of things i'm gonna do is start to notice when i'm a little upset.

Instead of waiting for it to get to a time when I'm very new, you could say to your kid, because that's what happens to feelings, right? If you don't take care of them when they're small, they get bigger and out of control. So I might end up saying to you at some point in the next day, oh, now is one of those moments. I need a break. I'm going to take that and I'll be back. And what I'd say to a parent, you can practice this for the kid. They love it. I would actually, okay, let's practice that. Oh, get off the couch. Oh, you're not listening. Okay. Oh, okay. Dad needs a break right now.

I'm going to go to my room. What do you do when I go to my room? Right? You go to the art room and you color. Like, you can actually practice this just the way we practice sports plays. Why do you run a play on a basketball team in practice? Because you know you're not going to do it in the game if you haven't run it over and over in practice. I actually think that's so powerful to think about our interactions with our kids in the same way. Then when the moment comes and you say, oh, now is one of those times, your kid has had a rep already.

And the whole moment will probably go a lot more smoothly. Do you have any other recommendations? I'm thinking of her example. I like that. And it makes a lot of sense. And I'm wondering what you do in a circumstance where you can't take a time out for yourself, right? So let's just say she's trying to buckle the kid into the car.

tantrum tantrum wine yell yell yell trust to the right thing trust to the right thing and our kids job yeah doing the thing yeah doing doing like you know the crocodile role in the babysitter whatever so i'll answer that question but i really do think again it's a framework.

shift question, because people say this all the time. It's like saying, when I drive my car to the cliff, what can I do so and don't fall off the cliff? Like, if that was a friend, why are you driving to the cliff all the time? How about we recognize that you're on the road to the cliff when we get to the point as a parent that we are so

full of anger, resentment, burnout that we're about to explode because our kid won't allow us to buckle them into the car seat. The real question, if you want to make a change, is how do I start to recognize them on that road way before I get to the cliff? What can I do? Why am I getting there so often? How can I get into a different road? To me, this is the whole idea of rage. This is actually something we talk about. I got inside all the time because when you don't take care of yourself as a parent,

When you lose touch with your friends or dance class or whatever the thing that made you feel like you before you had a kid, you better bet you're going to be screaming at your kids all the time because to some degree you're just saying, I miss all the other parts of me that used to light me up. And so I think that's the better question. Now, still, when you get there, this is where I think it's so important to establish that you said good inside it, sturdy, not soft. If your kid won't get into the car seat,

Okay. Hey, we're going to play a game. We've already practiced. We've done the things. There is definitely time and place, sweetie. I'm going to buckle you into the car seat. You're going to scream and cry. You're not going to like it. My number one job is to keep you safe, and so I'm doing that. Again, my kid's going to be screaming. I buckle them and close the door as I'm walking to the front, and I say to myself, oh my goodness. That was really hard. I'm going to go to bed early tonight. I'm going to call a friend. But again, that's an example. It was actually a good example because I actually heard this exact example from

Apparently, that used to drive me bananas. The reason that situation feels so exhausting is because on some level, you have job confusion. You think your job is to get your kid happily into their car seat. If you know your job is to keep your kid safe and to do what you can to try to make it smooth, but then if push comes to shove, you're just going to prioritize safety and you know that that's you doing your job. Actually, don't feel as exhausted by it.

Oddly enough, it is like a pilot getting through really intense turbulence. We're on the ground, a pilot to kind of earn my wings today. You know, you don't earn your wings by a smooth flight.

This is going to be hard left, but I'm curious how or if any of it will tie in. So you mentioned being a postdoc at one point, I believe. And my understanding is you worked with a number of people who had eating disorders. What did you learn from that experience? And what were you studying? What were you working on?

So yeah, I got my PhD from Columbia and then my postdoc year I worked with college students and grad students who were students at Columbia. And I did a specialty in the eating disorder kind of group there. So I saw a good number of eating disorder clients. I had a needing disorder in high school. And so I think through that, you know, and I'd been recovery for a while. I also just started to put more pieces together.

a couple of things I learned. Our body has this remarkable way to act out conflict if we don't kind of understand it and resolve it. Things is like a lot of what anorexia and bulimia are, things that we don't understand, things that live kind of informulated where conflicted about, and the body expresses it in these horrible, somatic ways through a needing disorder, through so many other things too. But as an example, and this is not true for everyone, but often anorexia,

is this kind of conflict around your relationship with anger and taking up space in the world. It's like kind of amazing, like in Anorexia, you both take up so much space because you get everyone's attention, right? And you take up no space, you shrink into a like prepubescent version of yourself. That conflict is being kind of represented in your body.

I think bulimia, how much can I want? Is it okay to want things for myself? Can I want things? What is my relationship with desire? I actually think anorexia and bulimia have a lot to do with your relationship with wanting and desire, especially as a woman.

Is there anything that you took from that experience, questions, lenses, insight that also transferred over to some of the work that you do now? Or is it sort of looking, I guess, leading the witness a bit, but is it like looking at the thing below the thing below the thing? Is that what it has in common with what you do now? Or are there other things?

I think, yes, that's the second part of that question. Like, what is really underneath people's behavior? That's always really driven me. It's why I became a psychologist. Why do good people do things that work against them? Why do good kids

out who high and do these things. Why do good parents scream and get into these kind of quick, fixed cycles, even though they don't want to do that? I think I have, again, it's like the curiosity over judgment. Always been really curious about that.

And then I guess through especially my work with people who had intense eating disorders. And this was true when I was in private practice too and worked with teens who were really struggling. I think I really understood and saw how desperate they were. Like a very sturdy leader who can make good decisions when they couldn't.

and how they'll say all the things on the surface that make it seem like they can be in control, but really they're deeply struggling and they're deeply in pain. And I think that probably helped me see kids struggle and pain underneath their disruptive behaviors.

reflecting back on my childhood. I have a younger brother, and brothers got up to brother stuff. He would try to get me in trouble, or I'd kind of wrestle him and beat him up. It wasn't malicious necessarily. But there were definitely times when he'd be screaming, like, Mom, Tim is hitting me, and then she'd run into the room, and he'd be in the room by himself. But I wouldn't say he was struggling. He was being mischievous.

And maybe there's something underneath it, but it seems like kids have this burgeoning sense of agency, and sometimes they're troublemakers, or do things that they know are wrong.

And I'm wondering how you handle some of those situations because you could try to develop a narrative around like the feeling or the pathology underneath it. But I guess maybe at face value, perhaps there are instances where kids are just doing something that was wrong because it's fun or whatever. What do you do in those type of instances? Or how do you think about that? Let's see more specific. Like your brother's saying, Tim hit me, but you didn't. Like he's lying. Is that the situation?

I mean that's an example I mean it doesn't weigh heavy on my conscience but it was annoying right and like when I look at his personality is an adult is like yeah, he's playful and kind of a prankster and extra the pop. Yeah, it's very very smart but I'm like yeah it makes sense.

I would say I definitely don't think my approach is about pathologizing things or even always like seeing the feeling underneath. I actually think what's core is this idea. And I'm going to say it again, but I really think it's so different from how we usually intervene that it is worth repeating that you have a good kid underneath whatever is happening there. So, okay, why is my good kid stirring the pot?

And my third kid is like this, I mean this stuff. And the fact that he's my third, me and my husband always say we delight in him because I think we're less worried, he will do stuff. Like, hey, why do all the bathrooms smell like pee? We just knew we should ask him. I just knew I should ask him. So when he was like five, he literally goes, oh.

Well, I just thought it would be funny in every bathroom to first pee into the garbage can and then dump it into the toilet. That might be why. First of all, I just tried to stop myself from laughing. I'm like, that is actually so funny. But you also didn't tell anyone for days. You just were entertaining yourself. It's just funny. And I go, can you not do that anymore? He's like, yeah, no problem. And you never did it again. Yeah. Okay.

No, I think it's really easy to be like, my kid's a psychopath. Like, what are you doing, right? But I think for me, and maybe it's because of my third, what did I do? I think actually the most underutilized strategy in parenting, and this sounds like a joke, but I do want to name it to make it official, is doing nothing, is doing nothing. Because you know what helped me do nothing, I have a good kid.

Did something actually really smart and funny that's just funny entertaining himself like i see him as a twenty-year-old in college i know exactly who he's gonna be and i kind of know over time, can like rain it in and it's not like he does that.

But he's maybe like your brother. He thinks funny things. He's industrious. He comes up with his own plans. And I think the idea, wait, I have this good kid. I don't have to take this all so seriously. Maybe I can trust myself to know when this veers into the domain of really bad or too much. And maybe actually what I do is just say, hey, can you not do that again? And maybe I know my son is always going to be a kid looking to push the envelope.

Knowing that about him means I'm less surprised. I can set up boundaries a little differently. And I can actually, and this is what I think is missing a lot, and it goes back to knowing your kids a good kid. I can delight in him. Delighting in your kid is so important as a parent. Your kids feel that and it changes and it doesn't make behavior okay, all of it, but that element, and I think that's what's missing when we're in really bad cycles. We just, we love our kid, but we actually really stop liking them. We don't even realize that. And it's really painful for everyone.

I want to ask a question also from my employee I mentioned earlier, which I was very curious about myself, which is if your kid is hanging out with other kids who are bad influences, what does an intervention look like? And I think my parents actually did a very good job on this with me, but it was simpler in a sense because no smartphones

We are living in a rural area. So if I wanted to hang out in our little downtown and get into stupid trouble with a bunch of troublemakers, it's actually quite difficult. I couldn't ask too far away from you to bike, and they held the keys to the car, etc, etc. But they were good with certain things that I hated, like curfews for coming back from like hanging out downtown after a movie or something, which was in retrospect, very, very smart because a lot of those people ended up in jail, ODing, etc, etc.

Right. They would not have been good influences. Yeah. What is the move? What does it look like? So there's a lot of degrees here. Only apparent listening is saying, okay, when I say bad influence, yeah, like there's stuff that feels legitimately dangerous. My kids older. There's, I don't know. There's drugs. I could give you a specific example. Okay. For a younger kid. Great. Okay. So I noticed.

When I was a kid, I'm very sensitive to animals. And there were a few boys who legitimately liked torturing animals, like they liked inflicting damage on animals. And as far as I'm concerned, that's just not a good trade. But it's like, OK, so some kids fucking with frogs or squirrels or whatever in trash can.

No, no, like, like me letting animals is a step beyond being in the trash can. I would say, but that kid is also like maybe fine in school, well behaved, et cetera, et cetera. And so you're like, hmm, that kid seems to have zero empathy. Like that's not even, not even registering on any scale. I don't really want my kid to be around that. Totally. So let's again go to Greece. So.

Torturing animals. That's like kind of a known concerning trait in a child among psychologists. Right. It's part of like a triad. You would say, you know, you know, so that's serial killers. Definitely concerning. Yeah. So that would probably be the same almost level to me as a parent is, oh, my kid is hanging out with kids. So again, I think there's legitimate. Sure. I mean, that stuff, I don't think the parents even have visibility into unfortunately. So there, I think one of the things you say to your kid, and I've now said this a bunch of times in this conversation, my number one job is to keep my kids safe.

That is such a powerful thing to remind yourself now safe doesn't mean risk free doesn't mean i keep my kid in a bubble but keep my kids safe and so.

I'm not going to let my kid hang out with kids who, again, it's not like they have bad manners. It's not like they do something that's like a little pushing the edge and funny like my son did. Like this is kind of where we would say it's over the line. So what would I say to my kid? Hey, I want to go hang out with person X and Y. Listen, sweetie, this is part of a bigger conversation. This is where this line helps so much. My number one job is to keep you safe. And sometimes that means not hanging out with certain kids who are doing really dangerous things.

And i know as an adult that some of what those kids are doing are dangerous and so i'm not gonna take you downtown to be with them now again my kids probably gonna be angry. I don't have to say to them because i know my role but don't you understand i don't like.

We really power ourselves to our kids' level. Like, I'm asking my seven-year-old to approve of my decision. Can you imagine a CEO being like, we're going through layoffs that they have to, and they're going to everyone's desk. Is that okay? Is that okay?

That's okay. We have to make an emergency landing. Everyone vote yes, I need everyone's yes vote. Come on, don't you understand? You just have to do the thing you need to do when you're in a position of authority. It's up to do your job. Now, exactly, do your job. There's something else though that happens a lot, so maybe it's not animal cruelty.

Right. I mean, another instance from when I was a kid, a lot of those kids ended up getting into a lot of trouble later, whether it was going to jail, drugs, you name it, they stole stuff. And it was a small town. So like people kind of knew like, eh, these kids are bad seats. I mean, I know that's a big label, but like not a great influence to have around your kids. Yeah. Yeah.

So yes, again, I think that would fall under my role around the boundaries. That is my job is to keep my kids safe. That doesn't mean no risk. It literally does mean safe. That might lead to hard decisions that my kids not happy with, but are part of my kind of being the true authority and the adult.

My kid needs. I do think the emergency landing is the most helpful thing. If my pilot said we're making emergency landing, and someone on the plane said, but wait, I have a really important podcast interview with Tim Ferris, and they were like, you know what? Fine. Forget it. Yeah.

You don't want that. Our kids are going to face tricky situations. And again, every parent knows the line between safety versus kind of playground. You can't play with us. You're a poopy head, right? Right. And then I think it becomes a little more nuanced there. One thing you said in doing your job doesn't mean

taking or exposing your kids to zero risk. And he actually made me think of a friend of mine, different former Special Forces guy, amazing guy. You'd never guess in a million years that maybe he's not like obvious. He's not in your face. He's more like a gray man for people to get the lingo, but

He has two daughters and he's very jovial fun guy. He's very easy going as tough as you'd expect, but on the surface, his interactions are very, he's actually very soft, but he ended up.

Basically creating this game with his girls where each birthday, they have a birthday challenge and it's something that's hard for them. And it goes up as they get older. They get to choose like their 10 challenges. That's kind of like having your employees choose okay, or whatever.

So they got into rock climbing and then into like i'm going to do the cold plunge in the lake for this long and then i'm going to do kennel ball swings with this and this many of this not the other thing. So for this people who ever seen the movie and i he's basically training with his girls to be and just like training this guy's daughter harrick bennett's the actor to be jason more but.

He is inoculated them against a lot of types of fear by expanding their exposure to all these different stressors and kind of making a game of it. And they do fail at points, but they get to contend with failure and then recover from it. I'm wondering.

If you proactively have done that with your own kids or how you facilitate exposing kids to this broad range of emotional experience that when they get into the quote unquote real world they're not fragile. Yes.

Yes, anti fragility is definitely a big, big goal. I guess I think that I don't often have to insert that as much as I have to be mindful of not removing it. There's a lot of opportunities for kids to be frustrated, to take on challenges. I mean, we're really talking about feeling uncomfortable.

Right. So don't do their job for them. Not doing their job for them and not narrowing the range of their resilience, right? If my kid is only resilient when they get the job and have an easy project and go to a dinner where all their friends are and get driven there and there's never any traffic, they're going to be in trouble, right? They're going to be in a lot of trouble, but we can't expect them to expect anything different if that's kind of been what we create for them during their formative years. So here's a good example. I'll talk about my youngest.

This is the one who pees in the garbage can't. This is my, I like this kid already. I like this kid already. He has something. He really is. He's my kid who wanted to get money to get a certain baseball card that my oldest son and he couldn't, was going to the store and he didn't have money and he had two somewhat loose teeth and he pulled them both out by the end of the day.

Because he figured he can get money from the tooth fairy. Yeah. And he did. And I was like, wow. Smoked industrious. Very industrious. High tolerance for pain. But I think he wanted to play sports and he's my third. So he's been playing for a while. He tried out. He made two teams for different sports where he knew nobody. He knew no kids.

To me, this is such an amazing life experience. Joining a team where you know nobody, and I would say in both teams, he's not on the stronger end. That's a really powerful life experience in terms of, again, the capability you will build. We think our kids are going to find the capability before, and then we get frustrated.

Come on, you can do it. It's not a big deal. Everybody in life finds capability after surviving, not even after thriving. Just after surviving something hard, the capabilities on the other side, you can't expect someone to access it before. You just have to tolerate the before. Now, I think it could be easy to remove that. I'm going to make sure I call a friend to join the team with you, right? And in some ways, we take our own anxiety and we add it, you know what I mean? Versus I really felt like my job

To me, here's such a powerful line. I remember before he went to his first basketball practice, and this team happened to be a team that they already knew each other for a year. So not only did he know anyone, they was, you know, some really nervous. And it said, that makes sense. I almost feel nervous if you weren't nervous. It makes sense you're nervous to do something new. Yeah.

And then after we walked home and he said, I think when they introduced everyone, I felt better. I said, you'll probably be a little less nervous at the next practice, but you probably also will be a little nervous. And I think this idea of when we build our kids' capability, your friend who has all those challenges, that sounds amazing. And there's all different ways to do things in different families. I guess for me, I see with my kids,

There's so many opportunities in life. I should say it's not like the linchpin of his parents. He's actually just like super active with it. And like all models that to me one of the most important things of building capability anti fragility is actually this idea of validation capability. This is hard and I can do it often when you do only one with a kid.

It backfires. So we'll be like, this is really hard. It makes sense. You're nervous about practice. Oh, and we just live in that world. And sometimes our kid feels like you're validating my emotions, but I'm just kind of like building my anxiety where we leave that out and we do the opposite. It's no big deal. It's just a basketball team. You're going to be fine. Kids have been doing basketball forever, right? That's often not great. And we think that's like building resilience. The lack of validation doesn't help your kid cope with the emotion. And so it's also not that helpful. Both is really powerful.

Oh, it makes sense that you're nervous and you're a kid who can do hard things. Oh, it makes sense. You're not sure how this is going to go when you're feeling a little uneasy and I just know five minutes in. It's going to feel a little easier. That idea that I can see my kid where they are and I can almost see a more capable version of them than they can access. By the way, I think great CEOs do this too. Yeah. Right. This is a hard project and I know you're the one to figure it out or good partners or good partners. Yeah. That's right.

I'll give a public thanks to my ex. She was very, very good at all this type of communication and perspective taking, so she was able to teach this whole dog some new tricks, which have stuck, and it's been incredibly valuable. Have you had any personal sort of parenting slips that you learned a lot from? Because one of the questions I often ask

Some force fitting in a little bit here, but it might work is like do you have a favorite failure, meaning like something that didn't turn out the way you hoped or was miss whatever, but it ended up teaching you so much that in the long term, it was beneficial.

I hear my daughter's voice in this moment saying, I started good inside for you. And the reason she says that is because I had my first kid, and at this point I also had my private practice, and my first kid definitely had his mouth bounce. He had his difficult moments, but there was something relatively linear relatively about his

Development, we kind of did the thing. Okay. Oh, here's hope set. You're going to figure it out. I'm here with you. No, you can't have that truck. I'm holding and I'm keeping you safe. And he kind of responded in kind. He would kind of, okay. And then I have all these people in my practice saying, Dr. Becky, like I'm doing the things you're saying, but I swear they're making everything worse. It's making everything worse. It's not working.

And even though I, in general, like curiosity over judgment in the back of my head, I was thinking what anyone would think. Like, you're just not doing it, right? You know, you're not doing it, right? That's all, but moving on. And then it actually kind of in these sessions would make me have to innovate. Like, okay, well, that's not working. And I kind of do love problems and thinking through things like, try this, try this, you know? And then I had my second kid.

and I feel like after a year and a half, I remember being like, I need to call all of those people that I was secretly judging. It's like, oh my God, I know what you're talking about because I am watching myself do the thing I was telling you to do when I was doing it with my son and I'm watching my kid scream or by the time she was old enough to talk, like stop talking, I hate you. And I was like, what are you talking about? I'm being an amazing parent right now. Why are you saying that?

I would say for a number of months, I really mean it was like a dark place like what is going on and what is my kid and why can't I give to her the way I know I can show up for my other one and

And then I feel like after that period, this is usually what happens, I feel overwhelmed. And then I have this thing I say to myself when I'm feeling really overwhelmed and like full of like self blame and pity where I say like, hey, Becky, wash yourself in it, fully embrace it. You're horrible. Everything's horrible. Like go all the way to the extreme and then go to sleep.

And I say, and tomorrow I'm going to turn it into fire because there's a lot of energy and feeling awful and overwhelmed. And if you can like allow yourself to embrace it and not fight it, then I feel like there's a day where you can like use all of that for something productive. I feel like that's what I did. And I started to connect these crazy dots in my head. I was like, okay, so they're all these families out there who are telling me the same thing I'm seeing with my kid.

Like these kids, when you try to talk to them about their feelings, even in the best way, they explode. Their meltdowns are like animalistic, hissing, growling, like really, I mean, really intense, they act like a caged animal. And then I thought about probably 30% of the adults I was seeing in private practice for really deep therapy. And the struggles, they had an adulthood, a lot of fear of abandonment, a lot of emotion dysregulation, a lot of really low self-worth. And it was crazy time. I mean, that's like,

They were all my daughter and they were all those kids like, I saw this whole thing and it led to this body of work where with the adults, I was doing this really deep therapy, kind of going back to some moments and really reworking them in this like experiential way. And they would tell me things. I'm not joking that I would then do with my daughter. Could you give an example? Okay. Here's an example.

So your kid has this meltdown and some parents listen and be like, yeah, my kid has meltdowns. I'm not talking about the run of the mill meltdown. I am talking about it truly the exorcist, the exorcist. It's animalistic because these kids and I call them deeply feeling kids. They experience their feelings as threats.

And so if you're feeling is a threat in your own body, think about what you would do to get rid of it. You have to like expel it onto someone and they're so. Poor us to the world that they get overwhelmed more easily and they fear being overwhelmed and they fear they're going to overwhelm you. And basically with these kids, their shame sits so close to their vulnerability. So whenever they feel vulnerable, shame makes it explosive.

And then when you try to get close like hey i'm here for you or hey you're mad. It's too close they actually do it sounds so existential but they fear that they are toxic and then they will kind of make you toxic. And so they say things like get out you leave me alone. And then parents we kind of take the bait fine i'm just trying to help me leave these kids alone they're completely tend to tend is regulated. And then they basically learn see i really am as bad and toxic as i was.

And we see this all the time in adulthood, act itself out. And so this is a good example of what came from this most amazing.

No, I worked with forever. We went back to this moment in her childhood where, again, she'd be in her room because these kids would be in their room and they're out of control, screaming at a parent, like, get out. And kids are oriented by attachment, which is a system of proximity. So when they say, get out, not calmly, we all say, get out. Someone's like, sure, I'll get out, but they're like not in a place to be making a decision. What they're really saying is, I'm so terrified, I'm going to terrify you.

And I'm so terrified therefore I'm bad because if I terrify you so much that you can't even be near me, I'm a vulnerable kid. That basically means like I'm not going to survive because I need your attachment to survive.

And I remember going through like what she needed in that moment. And I remember like kind of going through this visual of this like wise adult being in her room with her, stay even though she screamed, get out. Cause I always say with deeply feeling kids when they're in that 10 out of 10 state, their words are not their wishes. They're their fears. Honestly, all of us, most of us. That's a really interesting refram. Can you say that one more time?

When we're completely out of control and overwhelmed and we scream things out in that state, our words are not our wishes, our words are our fears. And I think even the visual, if you have a kid like this, what they're screaming, they're actually screaming to their feelings, not to you.

get out, leave me alone. I have the chills, like they're not talking to a parent, they're talking to these like terrifying sensations in their body. So we went through this, this visual and I'm in the room kind of like visually when you're doing this with your client. This is an adult. Exactly. This is by helping so much deeply feeling kids. One of the things I'm just giving you one example.

And I was like, OK, so I don't remember if it was her mom or just some sturdy adult who wasn't seeming scared of her. And I said, so she's standing at the door with you. And I remember this woman saying she's not standing. She has to be sitting.

And I kind of explored that in the imagery, which is if she's standing, I just believe she's about to leave. Like, I don't believe she's committed to this. So she was sitting at the door and I'm like, okay, so she's sitting at the door. This goes into so much more about deeply feeling kids, but in these moments, they need containment. They literally need to be with you in a smaller space because they're so fearful of how their feelings come out of them and like take up all the space that they need to essentially have us hold space with them. Like your feelings only go this far and I'm sitting with you at the door.

Like, I would never let you kill both of us. So my sitting here with you is almost a way of saying like, you are not so bad and awful and toxic after all. And if I cannot be scared of this one day, you will not in every fucking time.

When you do this, and it's more details than just this, your kid will end by crawling over to you like a dog and coming into your lap for a hug, because that's like exactly what they need. But that idea that you can't even be standing, I kind of knew in these moments she was screaming, get out!

I was like, you're not in a place to be making good decisions for yourself. It would be like if my kid was trying to cross New York City street completely out of control, like, don't hold my hand. You're about to die in our coming traffic. Like, there's something deeper. I'm going to hold you. And I knew I had to be in the room. But I remember as soon as my client told me this thing about sitting down,

I remember with my own daughter and talking to clients, I had all these clients at the time who had these kids because I was kind of getting these referrals from these kids labeled as oppositional defiant disorder. Difficult, dramatic, all of these diagnoses. I was like, wow, oppositional defiant disorder. You cannot like a child who you label as oppositional defiant. And we were all trying these things and everyone at the same time was like the sitting down and kind of imagining yourself in this just really sturdy way.

It short in the meltdown by like 90%. And again, that came directly from my work with. I think so many of my best interventions come from actually the work I did with adults, understanding what adults needed when they were kids and reverse engineering that to today's parents.

fascinating example, and I can envision it, and I can see it working. I suppose I've used different words for it, but a friend of mine recently recommended a book to me, which was something like a highly sensitive person or something like that, because I am what I say to people for myself, and I was like, this is a kid too, it's like my senses are very, very sensitive, very porous, and they can be incredibly overwhelming sometimes, and I've become better at

using that and managing it. But as a kid, I mean, forget about it. Well, you're probably what I would say is a deeply feeling kid, mine too. And I say to her, you're a super sensor because with these kids, I live in New York City and we'd be getting near the garage where we park our car and she would not want to go into the garage. The smells of even near the garage so easy as a parent to say something to a kid like, you're so crazy. What are you talking about? It doesn't smell any different outside here.

And if you think about what you're really doing is you're saying to a kid, I know how you feel better than you know how you feel. Now, again, the boundaries matter. Might there be a time, especially when she was younger would say, I get it. You smell it. It's awful. You smell things. I don't smell and I'm picking you up. I have to carry you in the garage. That's independent from my action.

But again, when we can't separate those two, we usually say super invalidating things to DFKs. We tell them they're dramatic. We tell them they're making a big deal out of nothing. The principle of all human behavior is we all need to be believed. And so if you don't get believed, you escalate the expression of your behavior in desperation to be believed. Then usually people lead with more invalidation, which means you escalate behavior further to try to get the original thing you are looking for. And with deeply feeling kids and parents, that's a cycle we really reverse.

Yeah, well, yeah, trip down memory line. That's wild. Send you the workshop. We have a lot of adults do it separate from their kids. It's all the same stuff. Yeah, it is all the same stuff. If you could put, metaphorically speaking, a message on a billboard could be a quote, could be an image, anything non-commercial, just something to get out to. Very large number of people could be a reminder, request, anything.

mantra that you find useful, anything at all. Can I pick more than one? Of course. Not the same billboard. I don't know about the branding of all them at once, but I have too many things. Yeah. Yeah. You can definitely have a couple. Okay. So I'm going to start with one that's probably most linked to our conversation so far, just my ultimate mantra. This feels hard because it is hard, not because I'm doing something wrong. And again, to me, the idea that we struggle and it doesn't mean it's our fault.

is life-changing. I remember during COVID when my kids were doing work and like work from home, you know, when they were like in school at home, that was like the thing I put on their desks. And I think when you're talking about kids working on math or learning how to read, doing a puzzle or doing something at work or managing your first conflict in your romantic relationship. So you put it on their desk like a placard or like a little dry erase board or I mean, I just like post a note. I took like a post a note and wrote it messily and just put it up there and say one more time, this feels hard because it is hard, not because I'm doing something wrong.

The difference between understanding something's hard because it is versus thinking it's hard because basically you failed has massive life implications on what we'd be willing to take on next as a challenge. Like, yeah, that's just a hard math problem. If it feels hard, that's because you're doing it right because it's supposed to be hard. Oh, I'm doing it right versus I'm not good at math. I mean, it's just remarkable, especially academically when kids are young, how powerful that is.

If I could put something different on a billboard, you're sponsoring many brand new campaigns. It would be one of two things. This is like different versions of a similar idea. Parenting doesn't come naturally. The only thing that comes naturally is how you were parented. Or we were never meant to parent an instinct alone. The whole idea of maternal instinct has had a profound impact on parents, profound and awful. And it's not to say, I don't think there's some instinct in us. Obviously I get that, but

It would be like a doctor saying like, I didn't go to medical school. Like I've surgical instinct, surgical instinct. And you're like, yeah, I'm just not going to see you. Like, and if your friend said that. Yeah, that's going to be a hard pass. Right. It's a hard pass. And it's just so interesting that I think we take learning seriously at every point in our lives. And then we get the job that's the hardest and most ongoing and most important job we'll ever have.

And we're socialized to think we're supposed to be learning before, like a CPR class, a pregnancy class. And then once your baby's like, one, the narrative I hear from parents, we hear this, honestly, because at Good Inside, I think way more than trying to help you through a tantrum, we're trying to elevate parenting. Parenting deserves education.

Because that's a good compliment with instinct. There are things to learn. It doesn't come naturally. We have moms, especially all the time, say, I feel like it's a sign of a failure. To me, I just don't know anyone who goes to medical school and says, oh, I have to go to medical school to become a doctor, unlike my friend who I don't know. How's a surgical instinct? How's a surgical instinct? Or I get my surgical tips on Instagram, and I think that's enough.

You would say to a doctor, yeah, that's cool. You want to stay up to date in some tips, but you probably need a foundation. And I think this goes back to fault, you know, where it goes back to how when we struggle, especially as women, we tend to think it's our fault instead of maybe something more useful, like a little bit of anger of like, wow, the system is pretty stacked against me.

Nobody is setting me up to have clarity in my job to know what to do and to actually feel resourced and supported. And then I think we'd find parenting hard, but we wouldn't find it as impossible as we find it today.

You said one of two things. Was there another version of part of me? I like to be punchy. If I was going to put something on a billboard, I wanted to create a conversation. Maybe I'd say something like there's no such thing as maternal instinct, not because I even fully believe that, but just to start a conversation on the limitations of that framework. I think the massive amount of shame it's created, especially for women and shame.

leads to an animal defense freeze state freeze. You don't act. So what's kind of amazing and fucked up is if you can convince women that they should be able to parent on maternal instinct alone, it's just a great way of kind of ensuring moms forever feel really bad about themselves and don't talk about it.

Yeah, that resonates. I mean, what do I know? I don't have kids, but just what I've seen with friends is there seems to be certainly there are maternal instincts for sure, right? Just like some people may be better suited to empathy and bedside manner as a surgeon, but you also want them to go to med school.

Two things are true. Two things are true. What I've seen amongst, because there are all these battles in the parenting discussions, right? There's the attachment parenting versus the sleep training versus a man. Oh, man, he's getting tense. I'm watching some of these things because I'm curious.

If one of the stories that sometimes pops up is related to mothering in different let's just say for simplicity indigenous cultures and what gets lost there is overemphasized is the instinct in what that means and what you can rely on what gets a little lost is society as you said how.

for a lot of women in industrialized western cities, let's just say, or westernized cities, or certainly coastal US in a lot of places. In those societies, I've spent time in Ethiopia and all over South America and so on, it's like from a very young age, they are being taught how to take care of kids.

In whatever way makes sense culturally in that context, but it's like from a very young age like they're getting training. That's like being born into like geo dreams of sushi and it's like all right you're gonna start with watching the box. I mean like a very very early age they're being.

taught and getting a lot of practice, which is just simply not the case for a lot of women these days. It would seem to make a lot of sense that they need to have the opportunity to be resourced, as you said. I think the resources, again, that I always want for parents to extend so beyond

just your interactions with your kids, like learning to set real boundaries is life-giving, like in every area of your life. And I think that's why when people are kind of involved in the good inside system for a while, like when we interview users, it's interesting after a while to say, oh, I asked for a raise for the first time.

My girlfriend from college always go away. And honestly, my partner always gives me a hard time every year. And so I don't forgo. And for the first time I realized, wait, Dr. Becky, like you said, those are my partner's feelings. I can care about them, but I don't have to take care of them. Meaning my partner can be upset and I can go on my trip. And then we always say, like, what about those tantrums? Remember how you can't? And they're like, oh, is that why I came in? Right? So I think what I want for parents and what I'd want the billboard also say is they are the gateway drug. They are kind of, you know, we come.

Our kids' problems, they're really a signal that probably there are so many opportunities for us to learn things that are, yes, going to help them, but are going to end up helping us even more. I want for parents, really, to feel like they do more than just put out the latest fire in their home.

So you are, and I love this value, well-known, as I mentioned, for your specific scripts, your word-for-word scripts, even though the intention is to use them to highlight principles. I understand that. What are your most requested, the fan favorites most requested as far as scripts?

What do I do when my kids having a meltdown that I just totally don't understand. So what do I do when my kids freaking out about something I don't understand anything about boundaries and saying no. How do I say no to someone without feeling guilty? How do I say no to my in-laws when they keep popping over? So anything about saying no and boundaries.

And repair repair. Yeah, I feel really stuck. And I just, I can't get myself to go to my kid's room and say the thing. I always feel like a script is like a door opening. Sometimes we need someone to open the door for us. And then when you get in the room, like, okay, I can do this. That's kind of what a script you give. What specific boundary setting or saying no, like within that subcategory? What are the things that tend to come up the most?

Honestly, almost always in a master question, my answer is almost always reframing the question. How do I say no without someone getting upset? I mean, this with love, it's just a bad question. It's a bad question. It's an impossible question. How do I say no and tolerate someone being upset? It's a great question. Love that question. So we'll shift to that. Usually when we feel stuck in life, it's because we're asking the wrong questions, not because we don't have the answer, but I think Scripps that you can get also get a great answer to the wrong question. Yes. That can lead you astray.

I would say questions are roads you walk down to make sure that the road is like the destination you want to end and not kind of a cliff or on the unproductive. And I'll share some of them here just because some of them are going to put out there. So how do I say no? I think saying no well really comes from knowing your why and really being grounded more in your experience than the other persons. The reason it's hard for someone to say no is because they've actually already vacated their body and if it's me,

Let's say, you know, here we are on Monday, but let's say you asked me, hey, can you do Monday at 3 30, I can't for whatever reason. Oh my God, what's Tim going to think about me and is Tim going to be really upset? What am I going to say when Tim says that that's the only time you can't say no from that place because you're no and setting a boundary comes from your place of authority. And if I vacated my body and I'm now spending all my time in Tim's head.

You've lost yourself in your fantasy of you've lost your and your fantasy exactly. Tim is probably like, why are you spending so much time? I had I would have just figured it out with you. That's what we do. So I think step one is actually coming back to ourselves like, why am I saying no? Okay. I'm saying no because I don't pick up my kids from school or whatever it is, right? It actually becomes a lot more self evident. I'm not able to make that time because whatever the reason is, right? And then I think one of the best thing with scripts when you're saying no, naming your intention, naming it.

Not just thinking it is really helpful in communication. I'm really excited about recording. I am unable to do this. I would love to find another time, right? Making it really, really obvious what your intention is really does get in, in a helpful way. It prevents someone else from misinterpreting it from you thinking, Oh, Becky, just doesn't want to be in my podcast. Right. And it also makes me feel sturdier because I'm kind of connecting to you along the way.

One of the ways to think about boundaries and how to actually set them because there's a lot of people who are like, I know I want to set them, but it's the holding and I just feel so uncomfortable. My mom's mad at me or my kids mad at me. Okay. So right now we're sitting opposite sides of the table, but imagine we're on a tennis court, I'm on one side of the court behind the baseline and you're on the other side. But instead of a net, I don't know, there's like a glass wall. So like I could see you, but whatever happens on your side would stay on your side. Okay.

The reason boundaries become hard to hold, because I'm on my side setting a boundary. So maybe it's saying to my mom, oh, you want to come over to see the kids. It doesn't work for us. We have to find another day. Or maybe it's saying to my kids, oh, TV time is over or no, sweetie. We're here to buy a birthday present for your cousin, but I'm not going to buy anything else, even though you see that thing you want. That's my boundary.

And on your side is your feelings. So if you're my mom, you're upset. And maybe your version of upset is tilting me who knows, right? And maybe if you're my kid in the toy store, you're upset, probably your version is screaming meltdown or who knows what it is, right?

What we say to ourselves all the time is, I can't set boundaries. I feel so guilty, right? Okay. In my mind, guilt is a feeling you have when you're acting out of alignment with your values. That's why guilt is useful. If I yelled at a taxi on the way home tonight,

I would feel guilty because that's not in my values to yell at anyone, definitely not someone trying to help me. That guilt would make me reflect, huh? I wonder why I yelled? What could I have done differently? Useful. But it's interesting when people say, I said a boundary with my mom because I just need the alone family time, but I feel guilty. I said no to my kid because I don't want to buy them everything at a toy store and I feel guilty. It's not guilt. It's actually life changing. It's not guilt.