Dr. Becky Kennedy
speaker
3,434 appearances
7 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 18 Jun
Dr. Becky Kennedy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
If I said to that kid, even if I tried, which I don't even recommend to make it about guilt, hey, I'm really sad. He'd be like, why would I care? That does not affect me. But those are just strong-willed kids and their arc, their skills are different. So that's number one. Number two, I think we have to also understand that our kids over time pair their big feelings and urges with our boundaries.
So your kids wanting to jump somewhere dangerous and learning not to jump, that just takes time for any kid. And it also depends on their temperament. Just learning to swim. Learning how to manage urges and manage feelings, it takes time. Our kids have a feeling or an urge to jump on the couch or an urge to hit their sibling, and that urge has to actually get paired with our boundary.
That's why we say, I won't let you hit. That's why we hopefully notice the signs our kid is about to hit and pull them to the side then to interrupt that arc. And over time, those things in the moment, along with some things that help outside the That's how a kid eventually learns how to essentially regulate emotions and urges so feelings and urges don't come out in the form of behavior.
Yeah. Look, I think actually... you know, what you're saying about your son and daughter is that they're actually, and this can happen a lot in families, it does, and it definitely happens a lot when there's especially two kids in a family because the binary becomes I have one kid like this and I have the other kid like this, right?
So there's this way in which it's adaptive to both be able to gaze in and know what you want And to gaze out and notice what's going on for other people. And most of us as adults find one of those things more natural or either more naturally oriented to kind of gazing in and being like, this is what I want and this is what I want to do. And I'm good at prioritizing my own needs.
And other people are more toward the end of the spectrum of I'm gazing out in my environment. I notice how everyone else feels. I might even to some degree feel responsible for making them feel better. Neither extreme is great. The balance of both is actually helpful. So often in families, these two things can be extreme in both kids where I'd say, we want to help your daughter at times.
Notice, hey, it's not your job to give someone else's strawberry all the time. Other people are allowed to be upset. You can support them or you can do your own thing and find your own Legos. And we want to help your son in that situation sometimes come out of his like Lego world and notice that there's other kids or there's other things going on. There's something in between both.
And I think, again, this is another one of those false binaries. And I actually think both sides are also very incomplete because this idea that I don't really say no to my kids. I just want to keep my kids happy. I can just tell you for me, I wouldn't define that as like love.
Well, to me, the things we really want to work on with our kids are practice. They're not like a moment, is this tendency to want to keep our kids happy. And I have this belief that optimizing for happiness in childhood is actually what causes a ton of fragility and anxiety.
So...
resilience a lot of us want for our kids as they get older we want them to be really resilient and i think the reality of life is you never get rid of the whole range of feelings i don't know one adult who doesn't feel disappointment who doesn't feel jealous doesn't feel anger who at times doesn't feel less than other people now the situation is different most adults know how to read so the situation isn't i'm the only one in my class who doesn't know how to read
The situation is changed, but the feelings are exactly the same. And so what kids learn in childhood, when their body is essentially forming their factory settings, their defaults, what range of feelings should I expect to have throughout my life? And even more profound, what is the range of feelings where I feel capable as a human? And the more in childhood your parents...
help you avoid hard feelings, fix things for you, step in too much, distract, give you a quick win. We think that makes a kid's life easier, but the message a kid takes from a parent is the feelings that overwhelm me also overwhelm my parent. Nobody in the world thinks I can feel capable when I'm frustrated.
Nobody in the world thinks that it's okay to be slow, kind of on the slower end of developing a skill. Fast forward to adulthood, there's basically one feeling that kid feels capable of having. Happiness. The range of feelings instead of wide like this, that a kid feels capable feeling, is like this. That's the essence of fragility.
If I feel anything but successful, if I feel anything but ease and comfort, my body has this massive alarm going off, which makes sense because every time in childhood I felt anything else, there was an alarm because everyone did whatever they could around me to, quote, rescue me.
It usually comes from the best intentions and it's almost counterintuitive. So I'll give a couple examples. And again, one moment with a kid does not make for a pattern. So my examples are meant to be illustrative of like, this is a general pattern. So let's say your kid comes home, they're in kindergarten, they're in first grade, whatever it is. I'm the only one in my class who can't read.
Now, I think our natural urge as a parent, because it's understandable. We don't love seeing our kid upset. They're really obsessed to say something like, that can't be true, or everyone reads at their own pace. But sweetie, you're so good at chess. You're so good at math. And if you think about the visual of this moment, because I think the visual really matters.
Picture your kid in a garden, okay? And there's all these benches. And the benches are essentially experiences. So right now they're sitting on the, I'm the only one who can't read bench. Really, Jordan, you and I know, that is a more general bench. It's really the bench of other people are further along in something than I am. Or I feel jealous or I feel behind.
Again, I actually think that's a bench you're on at various moments in every decade of your life. So my kid is sitting on the bench and we either want to pull them off the bench and we're like, look at that sunny bench. Or we do something that's also well-intentioned but harmful is we say something like, you don't really feel that way. We kind of say your bench isn't your bench.
No, no, no, it's not that big of a deal. That can't be true. And so what happens is our kid is feeling upset, quote, on this bench. And then they learn my parent is also scared of me being on this bench. So actually what happens in their body is they encode their difficult feeling next to our fear of their difficult feeling.
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