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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
No, this isn't important. You're overreacting. Oh, my God, I said this wedding. And then you hear the pilot because everyone's freaking out because, oh, you know what? Forget it. You know what? Everyone's upset. I'm just going to keep flying the plane. Now picture the passenger cabin as upset as they were. Now I'm like 10 out of 10. What? My being upset is enough to make a pilot change decision.
This pilot is now more interested in keeping me calm and happy than they are keeping me safe. That is terrifying. And that is what we have to keep in mind when we're making decisions as a parent to keep our kid happy rather than to actually help them with what's really important. And again, our kids will never say thank you. They're not giving us five-star reviews in that moment.
But I think if we actually start to see their protests and tantrums as a sign we're actually setting a limit and a boundary, our relationship with the tantrum changes because we no longer see it as a sign we're a bad parent. We see it as a sign that we're doing our job.
Look, I like it. I mean, in general. And what you're saying is I'm always watching to see if something's on the verge of behavior that is going to make him feel like a bad kid or him feel out of control or is going to overtly harm someone else. And at the same time, there's a lot that we can do to cope that isn't that. I don't know. You can go hit a pillow.
That's very different than hitting a sister. Right. And I think a lot of us know adults. If you would just say one second, I need a moment to go scream in the bathroom, that would save us all a lot of headache at work or, you know, at the home. So here's an example of it that happened the other day in my home. OK, so my daughter comes out. I make her breakfast. I hate that breakfast, right?
It was either avocado toast, which he loves, eggs, which he loves, or cereal and milk, okay? Like, it was, it's not my first rodeo. I'm not making something random and new right before they're getting on the bus. And it's so tempting in this moment. I want to be like, oh, you're going to eat breakfast. I made this. You like it. You're going to eat it. We just latch onto something.
And then we know what happens. I mean, nobody wins. All of a sudden now we're like really fighting about all types of things. She gets on the bus. I feel like a horrible parent. My whole day is ruined. I hold resentment. I'm probably mean to her when she got off the bus. And then I go to bed, like just feeling shitty about myself. Like the whole day is ruined.
So I think in these situations, like I don't like that for breakfast. I'm not eating. Or even a situation where my kindle mom is like, I hate you. We almost have this urge to prove and do all of our parenting in like the next 30 seconds. I have to like do all of it. It's almost like I don't trust myself to figure it out. And then we hear someone around us.
We hear our parent or literally our parent watching us like, you're just going to do nothing?
Here's my perspective on this. Quote, doing nothing on the outside usually means you're doing a lot on the inside. You're regulating your own emotions as an adult versus doing something on the outside, which looks like, oh, you're going to eat breakfast or you can't talk to me like that. No dessert tonight. We're, quote, doing something on the outside, but we're doing nothing on the inside.
We're just taking our own frustration and we're like, I don't really want to deal with that myself, regulate that myself. No, it's going to vomit it onto my child. And it looks like something, but it's actually just stooping to their child level and, again, not being a parent.
Doing nothing, it's funny what I always tell parents, why I call it a strategy with a capital D and a capital N, because if someone ever says to you, you're just going to do nothing, I want you to think, no, I'm not just doing nothing. First of all, do nothing is a very difficult strategy to employ. And I am choosing do nothing. It is a choice I am making. It is mindful restraint.
That is what the best leaders, you think again, the best CEOs, the best professional coaches respond. Again, think about LeBron. LeBron is with a group of kids and you're like, you're the worst basketball player in the history. And he's like, no, I'm not. Have you seen my stats? Can you imagine? You're like, you're so pathetic. What?
Versus if he says nothing and someone would be like, LeBron, are you just going to let that eight-year-old get away? That no one would say that. They'd be like, thank you for being an adult and just letting that moment pass. And I think in some ways we all need to like channel. our inner LeBron and recognize it as a sign of leadership, not as letting someone get away with something.
I think there's so many different things you're saying. First of all, is just how much is fun or joy of value in our family? Jumping on the couch is fun. Playing games and playing hide and seek or these silly things that kids do or how much do we just value joy and fun?
And is what my kid doing from a place of joy and fun or is it from a place of making a bad decision or really, again, you're probably not letting your kid draw a Sharpie all over the wall if they want to have fun there. Grandparents are going to call that being easy on a kid. And another framework is joy and fun and cultivating our family home to feel that way is actually a value of ours.
And when we can allow it, we do.
So I think that's one. I think another thing is something I think we all need to just pay attention to, because again, it relates to generations and what's harder and harder is, I can tell you for my kids who are now 7, 10, and 13, one of the things I really care about as a skill, I think it's one of the most important life skills, is frustration tolerance.
Your ability to tolerate frustration, which in the world we live in, is getting to be a rarer and rarer skill because dopamine and quick wins and easy satisfaction is just dime a dozen on our phones or on iPads for kids, etc. And so to me, that's just really important. I think everything that happens in adulthood that really leads to true success, none of it comes from childhood early success.
It actually comes from childhood success. tolerance of frustration and struggling. That's what makes for gritty, resilient adults is I don't expect to be successful right away. I'm able to tolerate working towards something and not yet having success. Ironically, the longer we're able to tolerate the space between wanting and having or between not knowing and knowing, the more successful we are.
Showing 921–940 of 3,434 · page 47 of 172
← Previous
Next →