Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Becky Kennedy (@DrBeckyAtGoodInside), the founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting movement that disrupts conventional parenting practices by empowering parents to become sturdy, confident leaders and raise sturdy, confident kids. Good Inside currently has members across more than 100 countries and millions of followers across social media platforms, including nearly 3M followers on Instagram alone. Good Inside released a mobile app that serves as a “24/7 parenting coach,” offering personalized, age-based support and an AI Chatbot trained on Dr. Becky’s entire library of content.
Dr. Becky is also behind the #1 New York Times bestselling book Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, a chart-topping podcast, a TED talk with nearly 4 million views on the power of repair, and an upcoming children’s book, That’s My Truck! A Good Inside Story About Hitting.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s start with what popped into my head.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Great.
Tim Ferriss: And we’ll just keep rolling with that throughout —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Love it.
Tim Ferriss: — and see if it goes somewhere 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?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Classic example is you yell at your kid for something. I’ll use this example, which is different than the one in my TED Talk because it also leads to some common questions. My kid’s stalling in the morning. I got to get my kid to school because also when I drop my kid at school I have to get to work and if my kid’s late on late, the whole thing. We’re all all so rushed. And my kid is saying, 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 I have an eight-year-old they can put on their shoes. And then we get to some crescendo moment where as a parent, and I’ll say, me, myself, because I have this too. I just yell and 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 if you can’t put on your shoes,” or, “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 in the more people-pleasing type, that immediately stops them. They’re like, “Oh, no, my parent’s mad at me. I’m going to be good. Mostly just because I really need to see that they reflect that I’m a good kid. I need that.” If you have another temperament kid, they use this as a way of, “Oh, you want to fight? I’ll show you a fight.” And they’re, “I am not putting on my shoes.”
Tim Ferriss: That was me.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Right. That is my third kid. Love him. What order are you?
Tim Ferriss: I’m first.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: You’re first?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: But I was a pretty defiant little kid at points.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And so then you get through the moment, you get through it. And then I think after drop-off there’s this immense heaviness as a parent and you’re cycling through different things that, again, whatever your voice is, might be your own voice or it’s probably the voice you’ve internalized from your own upbringing in terms of how people would’ve 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 through the morning? And then that usually cycles with I have an awful kid and my kid’s a sociopath and they’re going to go to jail and they’re never going to amount to anything. And either way, you’re blaming.
Where repair would be saying to your kid at some point, “Hey, I screamed at you earlier. That probably felt scary.” And this will be maybe the start of 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. I’m sorry.” That would be a repair. I’m going back to a moment that felt bad, 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 talking about what I would do differently the next time.
Tim Ferriss: All right, this is great grist for the mill. And part of the reason, and 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 I want to use that. 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 tool kits. Okay, 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.”
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: 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 —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: — 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 codependent or otherwise. I heard everything you said, but I suppose like some listeners, I was, always and never, these absolutes are very strong words. Why say that particular line?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And when I share a script, to me it’s often words that are representative 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, okay, I’ve got to write down that exact word. In general, take responsibility for your actions. Give your kid a story. Say what you’d 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.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 had a really bad day at work. And he comes home and for some reason I’m at his house visiting and his partner’s 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, “Well, if you just got toilet paper and ordered me the right thing, I wouldn’t be yelling at you.” And I picture the cringe and I’m, oh, my God, that’s the creepiest thing. Seriously.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re like, “Did I install that software?”
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 “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, 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.
Tim Ferriss: All right, 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. Perhaps you could just, in your, I suppose, framework or worldview, what it means to be a good parent. Could you define this or just speak to that and then we can use that as a foundation from which we can launch into a bunch of other stuff.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I should have a really succinct, really solid answer to that question by now, but I —
Tim Ferriss: Fortunately we have a lot of time.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Maybe part of what I struggle with is I think we probably think about that word or that term, good parent, is what I’m doing on the surface is something observable, or I think a core principle that I think about is actually separating 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. 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. I think that’s number one.
Number two, I think a good parent really activates curiosity over judgment in a situation with their 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 warm, validating connection.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned curiosity over judgment. Now when people hear this word judgment, they probably assume that as a negative judgment, but a judgment could also be something like, “Good job.” What would curiosity look like in place of either a negative or a positive judgment?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And I think the words “Good job,” I’ve gotten a lot of press from parents, “You’re not supposed say ‘Good job.’” Say “Good job.” It’s not going to do damage to your kid. I think there’s a lot we can unpack there. There’s deeper principles. What do kids really need when they have accomplishments?
Tim Ferriss: I like how you zoom out because it’s not whether you’re using the crayons or the oil paints or the acrylics or charcoal, you have to learn the fundamentals of drawing. And to do that, you need to learn how to see things. It’s returning to those first principles.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: That’s exactly right. But 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. This person’s 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, we go into, what’s wrong with my kid? Why do I have such a bad kid? My kid is never going to figure things out. I’m a bad parent. You just see something on the surface and you feel like you know everything about it.
I actually think, I’ve 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 one of the best words for parents, wonder. I wonder why my kid is hitting? As soon as soon as you use the word wonder, you’re unable to judge because you’re thinking and conjuring up this bigger picture. Now, where parents usually go when they hear me say that, is, “Oh, so it’s just okay my kid’s hitting?” And there’s this, again, judgment we even do there where —
Tim Ferriss: You must deal with so many people with so many strong opinions.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Well, part of it’s, 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 their 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?” What? I’m just teaching them how to swim.
Tim Ferriss: Can I pause for one second?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so I have a bunch of thoughts on this “Good job” thing.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay —
Tim Ferriss: I know that —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: I like your potential replacements for that. Could you, just to give some people a concrete example, what might you say instead of “Good job?”
Dr. Becky Kennedy: A kid comes to us and let’s say, I don’t know, a young kid brings us a painting and we could say, “Oh, good job. It’s amazing.” 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, again, “Good job” does not damage kids. But I think in those moments we want as parents to double down on building our kid’s confidence. That’s usually the goal we’re optimizing for. Then to me the question is is that the best of all options or at least we have other tools in our toolbox. And the thing that really builds kid’s 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, look what I’ve done and can someone in the world tell me it/I am good enough. That’s basically the world we live in and it makes you very empty and very fragile, very, very anxious.
Tim Ferriss: You talking about social media?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Social media —
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: — everything. So many things, 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 20s and 30s, 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 going to 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. What do I like better? Anything that helps your kid share more about themself, actually ends up feeling better to your kid also. I think about a little while ago, my daughter paints stuff and she did, she gave me this painting, and I’m a horrible artist, so anything she does is amazing. But what I said to her first, I said, “Oh, tell me about the painting. 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 did you come up with that topic? Oh, what made you start it that way? Oh, what was it like writing that?” Whatever the questions are. And I know it sounds annoying at first. I get it. As a parent you’re, really, can’t I just say good job? And of course you can. But then again, I go to an adult example. Let’s say, Tim, you redid your house and I visited and you really worked hard on it. And I came, I go, “Oh, I love your house. Good job.” It’s actually 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 ended the conversation that way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. I have a number of friends, 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 worked so hard on that,” to reinforce the effort, the process over the outcome.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Which seems to make sense. 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, they’re adaptable, as long as you understand what those principles are.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah, I think that every parent some percentage of the time would be, great job. That’s cool, that’s awesome. Okay. But those questions process over product, asking 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.
Tim Ferriss: What is your opinion of parents focusing or viewing their job as making their kids happy? Optimizing for happiness. Because who’s going to poo-poo happiness? It sounds —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I will. I will.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so let’s wade into the deep waters.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: It’s something people say as a throwaway comment. My husband always jokes, you’re at a dinner party, someone’s like, “You just want your kids to be happy, right?” And he’ll look at me and think, Becky, please don’t ruin this perfectly nice moment.
Tim Ferriss: You don’t take it.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Don’t take it.
Tim Ferriss: Don’t take the bait.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And I always do. No, I very much would say a parent’s job is not to make a kid 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.
Tim Ferriss: Can I just stop to say, you’re not going to like this maybe, why are people so stupid and just want to fight? It’s obviously you don’t mean that.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: We think in these extremes. We see that in all areas. And holding two things is true or holding nuance is increasingly hard in this world, which is why it’s even more important to have some of these ideas in our homes. You used the word optimizing and I think about that a lot. Zooming out, again, about Good Inside in general, is 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 kids’ 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 of times but as a pattern, is you actually narrow the range of emotions kids believe they can cope with.
Tim Ferriss: 100 percent, for sure. True in partnerships too. True in —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes, anywhere.
Tim Ferriss: — a lot of relationships.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: You end up having adults who are remarkably anxious. Prioritizing happiness for kids leads to adulthood full of a ton of anxiety.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah, I always think, and I think 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. 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, or 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. And 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.
Tim Ferriss: What does it mean to be a sturdy leader?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I love the word sturdy. 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. And the word sturdy just does that for me. And again, I think sturdy leadership is what we want in a CEO, it’s what we want in a partner, it’s what we want in a coach, it’s definitely what we want in a pilot.
Tim Ferriss: Does that mean reliable, dependable?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think there’s a couple ways. I think it’s a leader who is equally boundaried 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 operationalized as a really set of skills is you know how to set boundaries, and I think most people get boundaries completely wrong. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Could you paint a scenario for us? You have great scripts and people come to you for scripts. 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?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes. And then 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 a —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s get into the pilots.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Are you actually a pilot? It wouldn’t surprise me.
Tim Ferriss: I’m not a pilot. I have landed a plane, but I’m not a pilot.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Sully, right there, I got Sully. Okay. You’re many things.
Tim Ferriss: I’m definitely not the sturdy pilot you want.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I’m definitely not a pilot. 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 a loudspeaker. And I actually think they perfectly exemplify three different versions of parenting. 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 going to all have your frequent flyer miles taken away if you keep screaming.” Something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Not super reassuring.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Not reassuring. And the invalidation there, as a passenger, for me, almost makes me worried, does the pilot not know it’s turbulent. And, oh, my goodness, me screaming and being scared is enough to make the pilot freak out at me. 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 just scream at our kids and we threaten things, that by the way we never follow up on, and we just dole out punishment because we don’t really know what to do. That’s pilot one.
Pilot two is almost the opposite extreme. “Everyone’s scared and you’re right, it is really turbulent and I don’t know, I’m just going to open up the cockpit door and if any of you know how to pilot the plane, just come on in and take over.” And 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 this cockpit between us.”
That’s like saying to your kid, they’re having a meltdown because you say no to ice cream for breakfast. And you say — he really wanted ice cream for breakfast. I get it. It’s so 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, a parent will say, “It’s not working, it’s not working.” I’m like, “What do you mean it’s not working?” “Well, my kid still screams.” I’m just thinking about my pilot saying, ‘My announcement didn’t work. My passengers are still scared of the turbulence.’ Can you imagine who cares, 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.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by role confusion?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Well, I think every parent wants to do a good job, but over and over when I talk to parents and their kids are tantruming 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 will say, “I have no idea.” But again, I go to the workplace and I imagine someone that Good Inside, as a company showing up and me as CEO saying, “Do a good job today,” and them saying, “But I don’t have a job description.” They’ll be like, “Do a good job,” and they say, “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.
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.
Tim Ferriss: What would you offer as a sample job description?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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. And here’s a good example. I hear all the time, “My kid doesn’t listen to anything. My kid doesn’t listen to anything I say. For example, my kid is jumping on the couch right near a glass table. I’m like, “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 dessert because I don’t want to melt down later that night.” This is so common.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like a mess.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: It’s a mess. 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.
Tim Ferriss: What would you potentially do?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Great. Let’s start, I can’t even answer that without saying what’s the boundary? Because that parent, I would say, is not setting boundaries. And this is true separate from kids.
Tim Ferriss: Is it fair to think about boundaries as rules you follow consistently or there’s probably more nuance to that?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think it’s fair to say, but I would say it’s not the most actionable, helpful definition.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right, great.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 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. Boundary is something I tell my kid I will do. And its 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 versus, and this surprises people because too often I think Good Inside, we get lumped in with soft permissive parenting. This is zero percent permissive.
Setting a boundary and validating my kids’ feelings, being sturdy, would sound like this. Once I tell my kid, “Hey, get off the couch,” if they don’t, I’d say, “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 jump near that glass table.”
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 you in the eye and keep jumping up and down. Not because they don’t respect you, just because they haven’t learned how to control their impulses yet. 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’ll not look at you and say, “Thank you for your sturdy leadership. You’re so amazing. I really needed that. Thank you for seeing…” No, they’ll scream. But actually, when you understand this kind of parent’s job visual, you set a boundary. Every time you set a boundary, your kid’s going to 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 this 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.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to ask you about perhaps another facet of doing your job, but you can’t trust everything you read on the internet.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: No.
Tim Ferriss: 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 “Coaching a nervous system to cope with being a human in the world.” Is that a fair description?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Of what we do?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or would you say, “Hm, not quite close, close but a miss?”
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I mean, 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, it’s referring back to what I’ve 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, yes, you’re interacting with a child, yes, one of the objective 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, like how can you expect your kid —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: To be regulated? And I mean, some people are going to hate this, because I recognize that human children are not dogs. But for instance, there’s a great book, yeah, there’s so many terrible books on dog training, but one which has a 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 and offer a reward. But the reason I’m bringing this up is not that you should 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, right. And you need to be consistent.
If you are trying to shape behavior, you also need to be very, 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 sort of trained early on and then they’re 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 there are probably similar examples in parenting, I mean, there must be.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah. 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, the door, anyway. And he kind of said something to 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, “Sometimes bad things happen and it’s nobody’s fault.”
And I think for parents, like this is always true, like when your kid is really struggling, is it a kid’s fault? Is it a parent’s fault? I feel 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 kid’s 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 were struggling, I don’t think you would start an intervention at the associate level. Leadership would say, “Okay, it’s not our fault, but we’re the leaders, so what are we going to do?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And yeah —
Tim Ferriss: It’s not your fault, but it’s your responsibility.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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, it could be like there is an opportunity for everyone here.
Tim Ferriss: What is the MGI?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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’d say, “Yes, it’s amazing, but what are we going to do about it?” And they’d be like, “What do you mean? Just think about it.” I really don’t love thoughts without actions, I just like to know, okay, well, 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 identities, 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.
And 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 colleague’s behavior, my teammate’s 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 KitKats from, I didn’t eat before dinner,” and they have 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.” You’re like, “Well, my kid ate a KitKat,” and all of a sudden this is a matter of respecting me, right. Or 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, right. What is the most generous interpretation of why my kid would lie to my face? Whenever I ask parents that, it’s amazing their countenance goes from so angry at their four-year-old to like they’re like, “Oh, they’re probably scared of my reaction, okay.” And then eventually to like, “What do I do?”
But the mindset we’re in life, determines the interventions we use. And I can promise you, as long as you’re in an LGI mindset with your kid, with 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 were 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 a 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 prompt?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: No, it’s not —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you don’t?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I need more.
Tim Ferriss: All right. All right. So this is from Romper.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Romper.com.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And so this is the journalist speaking.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: “I tend to catastrophize, to jump to the worst-case scenario when we are 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; it’s 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?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That could be with your kids, it could be with your husband, could be other, but what comes to mind?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: It’s a great segue, and that is true, where my husband said to me when, during the pandemic, I kind of started this whole part of my career and I kind of versioned these 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 because 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 a very logical optimist, I think I married a creative pessimist.” He’s like, “Look at this.”
Tim Ferriss: Creative pessimist.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: You know.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think I’m short-term pessimistic or 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 I’m incredibly anxious when I want to do something and haven’t yet done it, that the way I relieve 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 yet action on it, I have a really hard time.
Tim Ferriss: What would be an example of that?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I mean, all during COVID, in terms of, I think one of the reasons I probably, in some ways people would say, “Oh, you were like there for me in COVID,” and I produced so much content, is I just needed something to do. Because the pause of that, the slowness, there’s not a lot to do to fix this, you just kind of have to be in it, is really, really hard for me.
Another example of that is, I think about my kids and they’re now seven, 10, and 13, so each of them, they go through 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 like learning to just sit with my own feelings. All of us who can be prone to action, there’s like 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 and/or with kids? And for instance, a few come to mind, right, there’s a book called Conscious Loving, I think it’s by Gay and Katie Hendricks. I always mix up the Hendricks, ’cause there are two pairs. There’s Nonviolent Communication.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Great book.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I was going to say—
Tim Ferriss: Internal.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Love Dick Schwartz.
Tim Ferriss: Internal IFS, Internal Family Systems. For people interested, I did a live session with him on this podcast —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Which got very interesting, very, very quickly. Fascinating practitioner, really useful system. Anything else come to mind? Any books, resources, anything at all that —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That you would kind of add to that list?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: The three books, I guess, that are top of mind would be, yes, Dick Schwartz’s No Bad Parts or just his Internal Family Systems book. I mean, he knows I’ve been very influenced by him and when I work with adults in therapy. And to me some of the best gifts and privileges, kind of 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: At school, it’s crazy. So IFS. Eve Rodsky book, Fair Play —
Tim Ferriss: I don’t know that.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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. Like that idea of mental load, the mental load of parenting is so intense. She really helps put words and a system to that, that I think makes a lot of parents say, like, “Oh, my God, I’m not crazy, like this is a thing, this is a system.”
Tim Ferriss: Why is it called Fair Play?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 like a disproportionate impact on your stress and overwhelm and there needs to be more fair play amongst teammates in that way.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And then this might sound like an odd recommendation, but Cheryl Strayed’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 worry I plagiarized you, even though my book came out before your book.” And I guess my, it’s very interesting, I’m just hearing my own three suggestions and none of them have to do with kids.
Tim Ferriss: That’s —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: But maybe that’s —
Tim Ferriss: But that’s super fascinating.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Maybe that’s my, revealing something, where, 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, I’m memorizing, but in the moment I just scream at my kid.” And then they say, “What’s wrong with me?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Right. To me, you need the key to the door that is the closet that has that shelf, right. Like if you can’t —
Tim Ferriss: Can you explain that one more time?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Like if all of your parenting strategies are on a shelf in a closet and there’s a door to the closet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And in the moment, you’re like, “I want to get that strategy.”
Tim Ferriss: Right. You need to be able to access it.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: You have to be able to access it. And so for any parent listening who’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’m at a 10 out of 10, and when you’re at a 10 out of 10, nobody has a key to any lock.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Strategy is not going to be forthcoming.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 or people are 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what advice would you give me since I’m currently wife/partner hunting —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: And I would like to have a family, but would like to hit some prereqs. I mean, I guess, technically, biologically not that hard to have kids, but I would like to have them —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: You could do it Tim.
Tim Ferriss: I would like the “build a family together” adventure.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’d 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 —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Leader parent? Right, so just like if —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If 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 figure, like really…”
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Sturdy leadership on the list. “One second, I’m assessing it for sturdy leadership.”
Tim Ferriss: So I’m looking for sturdy —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: “Pre-sturdy leadership.”
Tim Ferriss: Leadership. And they’re like, “Ooh, dirty talk,” yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 if you’re doing some of this work before, right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: So I think number one, again, curiosity over judgment, to me is very, very key for any sturdy leader at any age, right. So when you’re dating people, when you’re friends with people and in general, they hear something that’s happening for you and they’re more curious and they’re judgmental. “Oh, I did this thing. I had this awful interview.”
“Oh, what happened?” Right.
“Oh, tell me about that.” Right.
Or you even hear that they approach their own life that way, right. Where people who have really intense rigid judgments about anyone, they tend to be that way with others, ’cause they tend to be that way with themselves, right.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And then that’s going to be activated, probably with kids, right. That’s number one. To me, I think tolerance for inconvenience, it’s a really important part of sturdy leadership, especially with kids.
Tim Ferriss: How might you suss that out? I mean, you can go on like a 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?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think it probably comes up in our life all the time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I don’t know how much we’re always optimizing for convenience versus, “Yeah, let’s take the subway, it will take us a little longer, but it’s easy enough.” Or, “Oh, there’s a wait at 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 ‘cool,’ but random group dinner. And you know what? I’m going to miss that party, this is my best friend’s birthday party,” whatever it is.
‘Cause 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. Like I show up, I’m trying to grocery shop, my four-year-old is having a tantrum, and it’s just like that’s inconvenient, that I’ve spent —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 10 minutes now, dealing with that, and I want to be able to finish my grocery shopping.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 do you say to a partner like, “Oh, I was really upset you didn’t text me back,” probably, whoever the partner is, their first reaction might be like, “Oh, 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 that I didn’t text him back. I can be curious about it, be like, “Oh, tell me more about that.”
“Oh, I see that.” And I don’t see that as a threat to myself.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: That, to me, is probably the ultimate kind of indicator, ’cause that happens all the time —
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: With our kids.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, I can only imagine. Sure, it happens all the time. I would love to ask you a few questions that one of my employees sent.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Let’s do it.
Tim Ferriss: She has a toddler. In every instance that I’ve seen, she tries very hard to be, however she defines it, a good parent, right. And 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.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: But I want to hop to number eight.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: This is about grandparents. “Does Dr. Becky have any good tips on parenting our parents? Our ‘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?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 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 —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Fill in the blank.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: They’re skeptical.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So maybe you could speak to the grandparents —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And maybe that will also speak to the partner question.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Although there are different dynamics.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 at the core.
Tim Ferriss: What it feels like for her?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And so they’re interested in criticizing their kids, almost as a way of making themselves feel better.
Tim Ferriss: Feel better.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And then as the parent, we don’t even realize we’re back to being five years old and being like, “Please tell me I’m doing a good job.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And the whole thing becomes very, very toxic.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: To me, the most liberating thing when you’re an adult and it’s just an idea, obviously it takes a little to get emotionally there, is, I don’t need my parents’ approval. I remember when I realized that and I was like, that’s actually amazing. That just changed my life in so many ways.
Tim Ferriss: We won’t lose track of the grandparents question, but was there a catalyzing event, conversation, revelation, what?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: There actually was, like where I just remember going through my dating life and dating people that my parents would have some things to say about. And I have not, have any like majorly toxic relationships, but they had opinions. And I just remember one day thinking, the way it came up in my head is, “Oh, my God, wait, they’re not dating them.” Like they’re not dating this person, like there was an I, 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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, by the way, 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 my kids are like, “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 like, “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?” Or, “You have a bad kid,” or whatever they say.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or if they’re babysitting and they just do that.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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, and we have a couple options. I’m happy to kind of 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, ’cause 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.”
Right, 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, and 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 by my kid.
Tim Ferriss: So let me bring up one other question of hers.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I may bring up more, but partially because it also bridges to a question that I had. So 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 a break? Or what is the best response to avoid guilt and shaming language?”
Okay, because I was reflecting on the example you gave of the kid jumping on the couch and I could very easily see myself like, “Okay, I’ve done the work, done the IFS, got the key to the closet,” and I go through the routine, I set the boundary. “If I walk over there and you’re still on the couch, da, da, da,” I’m calm, I’m calm. Then I put them down, 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 —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: 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 —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I want to answer her question because she was generous enough to send the questions. All right, like is it okay to tell my kid that I’m upset or let me get her language solid —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Get frustrated —
Tim Ferriss: But the broader question —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think she said.
Tim Ferriss: 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 on the jumping on the couch example, when you’ve done the right thing two or three times and the kid is just hell-bent.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Still being a —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Difficult.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: So a couple of parts to that question. Number one, there’s this thing about, I hear it, and I’ve never said, like, you can’t tell your kids how you feel. There’s all these random things people ingest, I’m, like, I don’t even know who said that, but I think I’m not supposed to do it, to not get.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Whenever you’re —
Tim Ferriss: The 10 commandments.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 time to just be like, “I’m not going to let that take up too much space in my head.” If I don’t even know the name of the person who I trust enough to —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Let that live.
Tim Ferriss: Oscar Wilde.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: In my head. Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Abraham Lincoln.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Where I think there’s a big difference between saying to your kid, “Hey, I’m frustrated. I’m taking a breath, I’m taking a break. I’ll be back,” and saying, “You make me yell at you.”
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: “Stop doing that, that makes mommy so sad.” The insinuation that we say out loud, that your kid, your three-year-old, is making you feel something is actually especially toxic for kids, who you said like you were, who are kind of rebellious, who already kind of struggle. Because they know, like I’m a little more powerful in my family dynamic than I should be, people are a little scared of me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 it 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 better the next day, but I’m not such a fan. But what that has got kind of misconstrued as, is never tell your kids how you feel. They’re totally different.
Tim Ferriss: Those are different things.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 “abandonment.” That a kid can feel like, “Oh, did I make my parent go away?”
So, “Hey, I’m feeling upset or 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. 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 who you get reactive, you kind of get to the point where you boil over, such a powerful thing to say to your kid, to preview to them before, “Hey, I’m going to start doing something different going forward. You know how sometimes you get upset or I get upset and then kind of there’s like this big screaming moment, I’m really invested as a parent in trying to have that happen less. Just keep a calmer home. And one of the things I’m going to 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 — and you could say to your kid, “Because that what happens to feelings. 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, “Ooh, 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 with a kid. They love it.” I would actually, “Okay, let’s practice that. Ooh, get off the couch. Oh, you’re not listening. Okay. Ooh. 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? You go to the art room and you color.”
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, “Ooh, now is one of those times,” your kid has had a rep already and the whole moment will probably go a lot more smoothly.
Tim Ferriss: 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. So let’s just say she’s trying to buckle the kid into the car, tantrum, tantrum, whine, yell, yell, yell, she tries to do the right thing, tries to do the right thing, and —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And her kid’s still doing the thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, doing the crocodile roll in the baby seat or whatever.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: So I’ll answer that question, but I really do think, again, it’s a framework shift question because people probably say this all the time, it’s like saying, “When I drive my car to the cliff, what can I do so I don’t fall off the cliff?” If that was a friend, I’d be like, “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 I’m 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 at Good 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 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 sit 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 a 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 then 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. This is actually a good example because I actually heard this exact example from a parent recently 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, you actually don’t feel as exhausted by it. Oddly enough, it is like a pilot getting through really intense turbulence where, on the ground, the pilot says, “I kind of earned my wings today.” You don’t earn your wings by a smooth flight.
Tim Ferriss: This is going to be a hard left, but —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay, do it.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Ugh, I learned so much.
Tim Ferriss: And what were you studying? What were you working on?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: So yeah, I got my PhD from Columbia. Then in 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. And as someone — I had an eating disorder in high school. And so I think through that and I’d been in recovery for a while, I also just started to put more pieces together. A couple things I learned. Our body has this remarkable way to act out conflict if we don’t kind of understand it and resolve it. I think this is a lot of what anorexia and bulimia are, things that we don’t understand, things that live kind of unformulated, we’re conflicted about, and the body expresses it in these horrible somatic ways through an eating 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 kind of amazing — like in anorexia, you both take up so much space because you get everyone’s attention and you take up no space. You shrink into a prepubescent version of yourself. That conflict is being 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 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?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think yes, that’s the second part of that question. “What is really underneath people’s behavior?” That’s always really driven me. It’s why I became a psychologist. Like why do good people do things that work against them? Why do good kids act out and lie and do these things? Why do good parents scream and get into these kind of quick fix 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 are really struggling. I think I really understood and saw how desperate they were, like a very sturdy leader who could 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. I think that probably helped me see kids struggle in pain underneath their disruptive behaviors.
Tim Ferriss: Reflecting back on my own childhood, I’ve a younger brother and younger — brothers got up to brother stuff like — so he would try to get me in trouble or I’d wrestle him and beat him up, and 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 the feeling or the pathology underneath it, but I guess maybe at face value, perhaps there are instances where kids are just doing stuff they know is wrong because it’s fun or whatever. What do you do in those type of instances or how do you think about them?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Let’s be more specific. Like your brother’s saying, “Tim hit me,” but you didn’t. Like he’s lying? Is that the situation?
Tim Ferriss: Sure. I mean, that’s an example. I mean, it doesn’t weigh heavy on my conscience, but it was annoying. And when I look at his personality as an adult, it’s like, yeah, it’s like he’s playful and kind of a prankster and —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Likes to stir the pot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, likes to stir the pot. He’s very, very smart. But I’m like, yeah, it makes sense.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I would say I definitely don’t think my approach is about pathologizing things or even always 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. Okay, why is my good kid stirring the pot, right? And my third kid is like this. I mean, the stuff — and the fact that he’s my third, me and my husband always say like, “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?”
And we just knew we should ask him. I just knew I should ask him. This was 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.” You also didn’t tell anyone for days. You just were entertaining yourself. It’s just funny. And I’d go, “Can you not do that anymore?” He’s like, “Yeah, no problem.” And he never did it again.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay. No, I think it’s really easy to be like, “My kid’s a psychopath. Like what are you doing?” But I think for me, and maybe it’s because it’s 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 who did something actually really smart and funny. That’s just funny. And he’s entertaining himself. I see him as a 20-year-old in college. I know exactly who he’s going to be. And I kind of know over time, can like reign it in. And it’s not like he does that in the middle of his kindergarten classroom.
Tim Ferriss: Right. In the airport, yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: But he’s maybe your brother. He’s just — 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 kind of push the envelope. And 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 kid’s 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 were 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.
It was too far away for me to bike and they held the keys to the car, et cetera, et cetera. But they were good with certain things that I hated, like curfews for coming back from 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, et cetera, et cetera. They would not have been good influences. What is the move? What does it look like?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: So I think there’s a lot of degrees here, and only a parent listening is saying, “Okay, when I say bad influence, yeah, there’s stuff that feels legitimately dangerous. My kid’s older — there’s — I don’t know. There’s drugs. There’s…”
Tim Ferriss: I can give you a specific example for a younger kid.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Great.
Tim Ferriss: 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. They liked inflicting damage on animals. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s not a good trait but it’s like, “Okay.” So some kids fucking with frogs or squirrels or whatever —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Pee in the trashcan.
Tim Ferriss: No, no. Like mutilating animals is a step beyond peeing in the trashcan.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I would say so.
Tim Ferriss: But that kid is also maybe fine in school, well-behaved, et cetera, et cetera. And so you’re like, “Hmm. That kid seems to have zero empathy. That’s not even registering on any scale. I don’t really want my kid to be around that.”
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Totally. So let’s again go degrees. So torturing animals, that’s kind of a known concerning trait in a child among psychologists.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: It’s part of a triad, you would say.
Tim Ferriss: Good grooming for serial killers.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Definitely concerning. So that would probably be the same almost level to me as a parent as, “Oh, my kid is hanging out with kids…” Who, again, I think there’s legitimate danger —
Tim Ferriss: Sure. And that stuff, I don’t think the parents even have visibility into, unfortunately.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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. No, safe doesn’t mean risk-free. It 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 a little pushing the edge and funny like my son did.
This is kind of where we would say is over the line. So what would I say to my kid? “Hey, 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 going to take you downtown to be with them. Now again, my kid’s probably going to be angry.
I don’t have to say to them because I know my role, but don’t you understand — I don’t — we really lower 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 are going through layoffs, if they have to, and they’re going to everyone’s desk like, “Is that okay? Is that okay? That’s okay.” He goes, “Okay.” Or a pilot being like, “We have to make an emergency landing. Everyone vote yes, I need everyone’s yes vote.” Come on. Don’t you understand? It’s like you just have to do the thing you need to do when you’re in a position of authority.
Tim Ferriss: Just have to do your job.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Exactly. Do your job. So now there’s something else though that happens a lot. So maybe it’s not animal cruelty.
Tim Ferriss: 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 people kind of knew like, “Eh, these kids are bad seeds.” I mean, I know that’s a big label, but not a great influence to have around your kids.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: So yes, again, I think that would fall under my role around the boundaries, that my job is to keep my kids safe. That doesn’t mean no risk. It literally does mean safe. And that might lead to hard decisions that my kid’s 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 Ferriss,” and they were like, “You know what? Fine, forget it.” 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.” And then I think it becomes a little more nuanced there.
Tim Ferriss: Well, one thing you said, doing your job doesn’t mean taking or exposing your kids to zero risk.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And it 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 — nah, maybe. No, but he’s not obvious. He’s not in your face. He’s more like a gray man for people who get the lingo. But he has two daughters and he’s very jovial, fun guy. He’s very easygoing. He’s as tough as you would 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 their 10 challenges. It’s kind of like having your employees choose okay hours or whatever. So they got into rock climbing and then into like, “I’m going to do the cold plunge and the lake for this long, and then I’m going to do kettlebell swings with this, and this, many of this, and that and the other thing.
So for those people who’ve ever seen the movie Hanna, he’s basically training both of his girls to be Hanna. Which is like training this guy’s daughter, Eric Bana’s the actor, to be Jason Bourne. But he is sort of inoculated them against a lot of types of fear by expanding their exposure to all of 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 so that when they get into the quote, unquote, “real world,” they’re not fragile.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So don’t do their job for them.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Not doing their job for them and not narrowing the range of their resilience. 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. They’re going to be 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’m going to talk about my youngest.
Tim Ferriss: This is the one who pees in the garbage cans?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: This is my —
Tim Ferriss: I like this kid already.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: — my resilient rebel.
Tim Ferriss: I like this kid already.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes, he is something. He really is. He’s my kid who wanted to get money to get a certain baseball card that my oldest son — he 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 could get money from The Tooth Fairy. And he did. And I was like, “Wow.”
Tim Ferriss: Smart kid. Industrious.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes. Very industrious, high tolerance for pain. But I don’t he wanted to play sports, and he’s my third, so he’s been playing for a while. And the only teams he tried out, he made two teams for two 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 capability is 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. Oh, I’m going to make sure I call a friend to join the team with you. In some ways, we take our own anxiety and we add it. You know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Versus I really felt like my job — to me — here’s such a powerful line. I remember before we 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 a new one, there way — he was like, “I’m really nervous.” I said, “That makes sense. I’d almost feel nervous if you weren’t nervous. Makes sense you’re nervous to do something new.” And then after, we walked home and he said, “I think when they introduced everyone, I felt better.” I said, “Yeah.” And he goes like — his dad, he said, “You’ll probably be a little less nervous at next practice, but you probably also will be a little nervous.” And I think this idea of when we build our kids’ capability, I — 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 —
Tim Ferriss: I should say, it’s not like the linchpin of his parents. He’s actually just super active with his kids and like role models it.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: And to me, one of the most important things for building capability and antifragility is actually this idea of validation and hope or validation and 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. Ooh.” And we just live in that world. And sometimes our kid feels like, “You’re validating my emotions, but I’m just kind of building my anxiety.” Or 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. That’s often not great.
And we think that’s 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. 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 and 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. Right? This is a hard project and I know you’re the one to figure it out.
Tim Ferriss: Or good partners.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Or good partners.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 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 old 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 — so I’m force fitting a little bit here, but it might work, is — do you have a favorite failure? Meaning something that didn’t turn out the way you hoped or was a miss, whatever, but it ended up teaching you so much that in the long term it was beneficial.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I mean, 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 meltdowns. He had his difficult moments, but there was something relatively linear — relatively, about his development where we kind of did the thing, “Okay. Oh, you’re so upset. You’re going to figure it out. I’m here with you. No, you can’t have that truck. I’m holding it. I’m keeping you safe.” And he kind of responded in kind. He would kind of — and then I’d all these people in my practice saying, “Dr. Becky, 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, 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’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. I’m like, “Okay, well that’s not working.” And I kind of do love problems and thinking through things like, “Try this, try this.” 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’s old enough to talk, be 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?”
And I would say, for a number of months — I really mean this. It was 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 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 full of self blame and pity, where I say like, “Okay, Becky, wash yourself in it. Fully embrace it. You’re horrible. Everything’s horrible.” Go all the way to the extreme. And then I’m going to 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 allow yourself to embrace it and not fight it, then I feel like there’s a day where you can use all of that for something productive. And I feel like that’s what I did. And I started to connect these crazy dots in my head.
I was like, okay, “So there are all these families out there who are telling me the same thing I’m seeing with my kid.” 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 percent of the adults I was seeing in private practice for really deep therapy and the struggles they had in adulthood, a lot of fear of abandonment, a lot of emotional dysregulation, a lot of really low self-worth. And it was crazy, Tim, I mean — I was like, “Oh, my God, they were all my daughter and they were all those kids.” 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 experiential way. And they would tell me things, I’m not joking, that I would then do with my daughter.
Tim Ferriss: Could you give an example?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Okay, here’s an example. So your kid has this meltdown and some parents that’s going to be like, “Yeah, my kid has meltdowns.” Okay, I’m not talking about the run-of-the-mill meltdown. I am talking about it truly —
Tim Ferriss: The Exorcist.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: The Exorcist. It’s animalistic because these kids, and I call them deeply feeling kids, they experience their feelings as threats. And so if your feeling is a threat in your own body, think about what you would do to get rid of it. You have to expel it onto someone. And they’re so porous to the world that they get overwhelmed more easily and they fear being overwhelmed, and then 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. I hate you. Leave me alone.” And then as parents, we kind of take the bait, “Fine, I’m just trying to help.” And then we leave these kids alone, they’re completely 10 to 10 dysregulated, and then they basically learn, “See, I really am as bad and toxic as I worried I was.” And we see this all the time in adulthood act itself out. This is a good example of what came from this most amazing adult I worked with forever. And 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,” and someone’s like, “Sure, I’ll get out.” But they’re 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 what she needed in that moment. And I remember going through this visual of this wise adult being in her room with her, staying, even though she screamed, “Get out.” Because 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.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a really interesting reframe. Can you say that one more time?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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.” They’re not talking to a parent. They’re talking to these terrifying sensations in their body. So we went through this visual, and I’m in the room kind of like visually with her —
Tim Ferriss: And you’re doing this with your client?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: This is an adult. Exactly. This is what helped me so much with deeply feeling kids. One of the things, I’m just giving you one example. And I was like, “Okay.” 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 and the imagery and she was — if she’s standing, I just believe she’s about to leave. 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.” And 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 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 because I would never let you kill both of us so my sitting here with you is almost a way of saying, ‘You are not so bad and awful and toxic after all.’ And if I cannot be scared of this, one day, you will not.” And 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 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.” I’d be like, “Yeah, your words are not — you’re about to die in oncoming 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 shortened the meltdown by 90 percent.” And again, that — it 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 and kind of — when they were kids, and reverse engineering that to today’s parents.
Tim Ferriss: Fascinating example. And I can envision it. 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, The Highly Sensitive Person or something like that. Because what I say to people for myself, and I was like, “This is a kid too,” is my senses are very, very sensitive, very porous, and it can be incredibly overwhelming sometimes. And I’ve become better at using that and managing it. But as a kid, forget about it. Different story.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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.
Tim Ferriss: I like that.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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. It’s 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.
A 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 were looking for. And with deeply feeling kids and parents, that’s a cycle we really reverse.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Trip down memory lane. That’s wild. Makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I’ll send you the workshop.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: We have a lot of adults do it separate from their kids. It’s all the same stuff.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s all the same stuff. If you could put metaphorically speaking a message on a billboard, it could be a quote, it could be an image, anything non-commercial, just something to get out to very large number of people. It could be a reminder, a request, anything, mantra that you find useful, anything at all. What might you put on?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Can I pick more than one?
Tim Ferriss: Of course.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Not in the same billboard. I don’t know about the branding of all them at once, but I have too many things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can definitely have a couple.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 work from home, when they were in school at home, that was the thing I put on their desks. And I think when you’re talking about kids working on math, or learning how to read, or doing a puzzle, or doing something at work, or managing your first conflict in your romantic relationship.
Tim Ferriss: So you put it on their desk like a placard or just little dry-erase board or like a Post-It Note?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I took a Post-It Note and wrote it messily and just put it up there.
Tim Ferriss: And say it one more time.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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. 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 or if I have like you’re sponsoring many branding campaigns.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. Infinite billboard budget.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: It would be one of two things. And this is 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 on 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, “I didn’t go to medical school. I have surgical instinct.” Surgical instinct. And you’re like, “Yeah, I’m just not going to see you.” And if your friend said that —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s going to be a hard pass.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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 I’ll take 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 or 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. And really we have moms especially all the time say, “I feel like it’s a sign, I’m a failure.” Which 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Has a surgical instinct.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Has a surgical instinct. “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 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, 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.
Tim Ferriss: You said one of two things. Was there another variant?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Oh, just some version of, I think part of me, I like to be punchy. If I was going to put something on a billboard, I wanted to create a conversation. So 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. And 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 ensuring moms forever feel really bad about themselves and don’t talk about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. That resonates. I mean look, 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.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: For sure.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Two things are true, two things are true.
Tim Ferriss: And what I’ve seen amongst, because there are all these battles in the parenting discussions. There’s the attachment parenting versus the sleep training, versus, and man, oh, man, this is getting intense. I’m watching some of these things because I’m curious. But 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 and what that means and what you can rely on. What gets a little lost is societally, 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 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, they’re getting training that’s like being born into Jiro Dreams of Sushi. And it’s like, “All right, you’re going to start with washing the pots.” I mean, from 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. So it would seem to make a lot of sense that they need to have the opportunity to be resourced, as you said.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah, and I think the resources, again, that I always want for parents extend so beyond just your interactions with your kids. Learning to set real boundaries is life-giving. Again, 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, when we interview users, it’s interesting after a while they say, “Oh, I asked for a raise for the first time.” My girlfriends from college always go away. And honestly, my partner always gives me a hard time every year. And so I don’t go. 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, “What about those tantrums? Remember how you can?” And they’re like, “Oh, is that why I came in?” So I think what I want for parents and what I’d want the billboard to also say is —
Tim Ferriss: Tantrums are the gateway drug.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: They are. 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. And I think I want for parents really to feel like they do more than just put out the latest fire in their home.
Tim Ferriss: So you are, and I love this about you, 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 the fan favorites most requested as far as scripts?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think what do I do when my kid’s having a meltdown that I just totally don’t understand? So what do I do when my kid’s 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.
Tim Ferriss: Repair.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yeah. I feel really stuck and I can’t get myself to go to my kid’s room and say the thing. And yeah, I always feel like a script is a door opening. Sometimes we need someone to open the door for us. And then when you get in the room you’re like, “Okay, I can do this. But that’s kind of what a script can give.”
Tim Ferriss: What specific boundary setting or saying no within that subcategory, what are the things that tend to come up the most?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think honestly, almost always when I’m asked a 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.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a bad question.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: It’s an impossible question. “How do I say ‘No’ and tolerate someone being upset?” is a great question. Love that question. So I’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 answers.
Tim Ferriss: 100 percent.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: But I think scripts that —
Tim Ferriss: Because you can also get a great answer to the wrong question and that can lead you astray.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Yes. Right. I always say questions are roads you walk down and to make sure that the road is the destination you want to end in, not kind of a cliff or something unproductive. But I think, yeah, and I’ll share some of them here just because some of them aren’t going to put out there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: So how do I say no? Again, I think saying no well really comes from knowing your why and really being grounded more in your experience than the other person’s. 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 here we are on Monday, but let’s say you ask me, “Hey, can you do Monday at 3:30?” I’m like, “Oh, I really can’t for whatever reason. Oh, my God, what is 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 your no in 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.
Tim Ferriss: In your fantasy of —
Dr. Becky Kennedy: You’ve lost in your fantasy. Exactly. Tim’s probably like, “Why are you spending so much time in my head? I would’ve just figured it out with you.” But that’s what we do. So I think step one is actually coming back to ourselves. Why am I saying no? Okay, I am saying no because I don’t know how to pick up my kids from school or whatever it is. It actually becomes a lot more self-evident. I’m not able to make that time because whatever the reason is. 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’m unable to do this. I would love to find another time.
Making it really, really obvious what your intention is really does get 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.” 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 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. And my mom’s mad at me, or my kid’s mad at me.” So right now we’re sitting on opposite sides of the table. But imagine we’re on a tennis court, okay. 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 a glass wall, so I could see you, but whatever happens on your side would stay on your side.
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 guilting me.
Tim Ferriss: I guess, yeah.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 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. What we say to ourselves all the time is, “I can’t set boundaries. I feel so guilty.” Right?
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 set 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 the toy store and I feel guilty.”
It’s not guilt, it’s actually life-changing. It’s not guilt because you’re acting in alignment with your values. So then begs the question, what is it? It’s our tendency to see other people’s distress on their side of the tennis court. And this usually happens in childhood. We learn. We kind of say, “I will take that for you. I will take your upset and bring it to my body and put it in my body to metabolize it for you. And I will call it guilt.”
But it’s not guilt. It is someone else’s feelings that you’re feeling for them. And not only is that not good for you, it’s actually awful for the other person because if you metabolize let’s say your kid’s feelings for them, they never learn to deal with the stress. You can also never empathize. Because the only reason I can empathize is if I actually see your feelings as yours. So I actually have to, when I do this exercise, this workshop where I’ll say to someone, “You have to give that feeling back to its rightful owner.”
Let’s say I take my kid to a toy store and I say to my friend, “I really do want to say no to them, but I have the money and I feel so guilty. And even though I want to say no, okay, but now maybe it’s not guilt. How do I deal with that?” What happens is you’re on one side of the tennis court and there, your kid’s frustration, distress starts to come over. And instead of going and hitting against the glass wall and going back to them, which by the way is what you want, you need people’s feelings to stay on their side of the court. It kind of comes over to me. I’m like, “I can’t.”
What you have to do is actually almost put your hands up and push it back. And actually the visual is powerful. That’s my kid’s feeling, or my mom is upset, she can’t come over. If I actually think about it, that makes sense. I’m allowed to say no. And they’re allowed to be upset is like a great life mantra. They’re equally true. No one’s a bad person. My mom is not a bad person for feeling upset that she can’t see her grandkid. I am not a bad person for saying the time doesn’t work for me. Those two things just happen not to kind of be in line with each other. So I have to hold them at the same time. They’re both true. Neither is wrong and neither is more true than the other. And if you see your mom’s feelings as real, ironically now you can actually empathize with her. Because as long as you’re taking on the feelings, you can’t empathize. You’re responding to your mom to take care of your own feelings that weren’t yours.
Tim Ferriss: You’re putting yourself in the washing machine as opposed to looking through the glass at what’s inside the washing machine.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: 100 percent. That’s right. And so holding boundaries, you get better when you picture that tennis court and you start to ask yourself, “Am I really feeling guilt? It’s probably not. Can I give that person’s feelings back?” And then empathy actually helps you hold a boundary. “Oh, I get it, Mom. You wish you could come over. I know I’d be upset if I were you too.” “Oh, does that mean I can come over?” “No, it doesn’t. I’m just saying I understand.” And then that’s how — so that visual I think is powerful, tennis court.
Tim Ferriss: We have just a few minutes until our time. I thought I would just open the floor to ask you if there are any things we didn’t touch upon that you’d like to mention. If there are any requests of my audience, my listeners, any reminders, closing thoughts. Anything at all that you’d like to add and people can certainly find Good Inside at goodinside.com, and we’ll link to all your socials as well. Instagram, Dr. Becky at Good Inside, I believe. And we’ll put all these in the show notes. Of course, the book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be. We’ll link to the TED Talk. We will link to all the goodies in the show notes. But is there anything else that you’d like to mention?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: No, I mean, I think that I find learning and reflection to be really such a brave endeavor. I really, really do. Because if you’re thinking about yourself or thinking about why we do the things the way we do, or “Oh, maybe I do want to intervene differently.” There’s probably someone at this point saying, “Maybe my kid is a deeply feeling kid. Should I go learn more about that?” I feel like that’s very brave because to do that you’re going to be confronted by feelings of like, “Oh, shoot, I’m going to do that.” And we all have wondering questions of, “Did I mess my kid?” Which you didn’t, but we wonder it and then we feel upset. And then to kind of push forward and say like, “Okay, I’m going to tolerate those feelings in the pursuit of finding something that’s going to end up feeling better to me.”
I just find it very admirable and increasingly hard to do in today’s world that we’re all oriented around short-term convenience and gratification. So for anyone listening at this point, I really, I just want to say thank you. I want to say there’s probably a lot of tolerance of uncomfortable emotions along the way. There’s no one we care about in the world and the way that we care about our kids. We’re so invested in it. So thinking about getting support, thinking about taking a workshop or getting a resource. On some level it seems like, “Well, yeah, it’s the person I care the most about. I’m going to do that.” But there is this pull away of like, “Ooh, I don’t know if I want to look at something.” And so the people who are willing to do that, I just think that’s my type of people and I love people who can do hard things. So I want to say thank you.
And then the thing I want to hold right next to that is everything I said today, and I should have said this in the beginning. I myself definitely do not do 100 percent of the time as a parent. And it really matters to me that people know that number one, just because it’s true and I don’t want to misrepresent myself. But there’s no perfect parent, kids don’t need a perfect parent. That would again be weird if we set our kid to think that their most important relationships down the road are going to be with people who are always perfectly attuned to their every feeling and need. That would be very counterproductive.
And so again, maybe we end with what we began with is the most powerful relationship strategy I believe we have in any relationship is repair. It’s our willingness to go back, to take responsibility, to say, “Hey, I wish I handled that differently.” To then hopefully actually do a little bit of the investigation or resourcing. We need to actually do it differently, but I want to leave parents or any listener with that. There’s nothing more powerful than repair. There’s nothing as important to get good at as repair, which also means you have to mess up because the only way you can repair is if you did mess up. And so I just want to leave people with that more balanced human note because that’s the thing I usually hold onto myself.
Tim Ferriss: And for people who are curious, they want to explore the world of Good Inside, Dr. Becky Kennedy, where would you suggest they start in terms of dipping a toe in the water? Let’s just for the purpose of applying some constraints, somebody who doesn’t — maybe they don’t have the ability or the financial resources to go to an external workshop or something like that, where might they start?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Let’s say go to your local library and request the book if it’s not in, definitely get on the request list for Good Inside. I would say come to goodinside.com and sign up for our emails. I am bursting with new thoughts all the time, and I always need containers for them. So one container is our email, our kind of weekly thoughts for me. On Thursdays I send out Instagram, my own podcast, sorry, I should say I’m on a podcast now. Podcast listeners usually listen to other podcasts, so maybe that’s best. That’s just called Good Inside. We try to keep it simple. And goodinside.com is kind of the home for everything we do.
And then I would say if your kid is, I love to help people whose kids aren’t just struggling. It’s kind of like waiting to go to marriage counseling until you’re in a problem. It’s never the best. But a lot of us wait. I really think of our resources inside our app as about your kids and your own emotional wellness. I think we make that very accessible compared to other emotional wellness resources. So that’s there too.
Tim Ferriss: Well, folks, there you have it. That is how you wade into the waters and I’m so happy we could have this conversation. Thank you for taking the time.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Thank you. This is awesome.
Tim Ferriss: And took a lot of notes for myself also. Best to be prepared. It might take a little while for me to get the kiddos online, but that is the plan. I really appreciate what you are teaching. These toolkits are incredibly powerful. And as we have mentioned and alluded to multiple times in this conversation, you can apply these things everywhere. It is not limited to your interactions with your kids.
And to everybody listening, thanks for sticking around. Thanks for tuning in. And as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, until next time. That includes other people but that also includes yourself. And for links to everything we discussed, you can find them in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And I’ll repeat myself. But thanks for tuning in.
Until next time, take care.
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This episode is exactly why your show is worth the hours of listening to because you bring on experts who are often contrarians achieving impressive results. I loved the analogy that parents shouldn’t rely just on a hunch just like surgeons should not wing it! They go to med school, they are trained in their craft and we can do the same in our parenting skills. Loved this episode and immediately sent it to my wife telling her she is doing some of these great strategies already like “repair” and being curious on behaviors. Thanks Tim and Dr Kennedy!