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
100%. There might be experts. There might be the right community. There's courses we can take. There's so many resources right now. There's the book. We do a million workshops, right? The reason I do workshops is because I was like, I have this private practice where I see a very limited group of people.
And I was like, honestly, at the end of the day, I kind of have some version of the same 10 to 15 sessions all day long. They're always about the same topics, right? Slightly different story, but same core things. And I was like, I would like to democratize access to that. So that's what my workshops are. They're just... things that would come up in private practice, but to more people.
So there's so many resources. That's number one.
Number two is that our job is not to make our kid happy.
Because when we focus on making our kids happy. we actually start to make them fearful and less tolerant of all of the other emotions that will inevitably be part of their life into adulthood. And so when our kid says, I'm gonna make this up, like, I'm the only one in my class who can't read. It's like the most painful moment as a parent. Oh, I feel my kid's pain, right?
And maybe, let's just say it's true. They really might be. We have the urge to say, everyone reads at their own pace, but you're amazing at soccer, but you're so good at math. I want to make them happy. All that does for my kid is, because during childhood, Kids are not just learning about a situation with a parent.
They're taking interactions and they're making generalizations, not from one moment, but patterns about what emotions are safe? What emotions can I deal with? What can I tolerate? And what emotions, as soon as I feel them, do I need to like turn off right away? And so when a kid says, I'm the only one who can't read,
The truth is when our kid is an adult, they probably won't say that, but they'll probably say, I'm the only one who, whatever it is, didn't get a job yet. I'm the only one of my friends who didn't buy their own house, right? Whatever it is, like we're always gonna feel that way. And so when we make our kid happy, what we actually say to them
is I am just as scared of this emotion you're feeling as you are. Wow.
I'm terrified. I want to run away from it. I want to do anything but this. And so what a kid's circuit is, I feel, let's say it's this, I feel less than, or it could be, I feel jealous. I feel sad. I feel disappointed. And what gets layered next to that in the circuit is my parents' fear, my parents' avoidance. Those things get put together. The irony is when you make-
happiness a goal of childhood, you actually set a kid up for an adulthood of anxiety because they have a range of emotions that they've encoded as wrong and fearful. And to me, anxiety actually isn't a feeling. It's the experience of wanting to run away from a feeling.
And you can't really run away from a feeling inside your body. That's what anxiety is. You're like, wait, this is not going to win. And so to me, the idea of we want to help kids become resilient, resilience over happiness and resilience comes from being able to tolerate and sit with the widest range of emotions, not constrict ourselves.
That's right. Because like when I, you know, I always joke when I was in private practice, I saw a lot of, you know, 20 year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds. And not one of them came to my practice saying, Dr. Becky, like I had the best parents. And, you know, those emotions, other people feel like jealous and sad and like those hard things. I got rid of them. My parents got rid of them.
I've never felt them again. Like that's never that obviously has never happened. But what happened over and over, even though no one said it, but their stories and behavior really exemplified it was I am now 23. I'm now 45 and I'm literally no better able to regulate frustration and disappointment and sadness than I was when I was a toddler. Wow. And but the stakes are higher.
Way higher. So emotion regulation, that is the goal of childhood. I mean, that's the goal of adulthood too, by the way. It's still the goal. We're all working on it.
That is completely accurate. And I think, you know, I double down on that and say, I think when we have kids, we have this unconscious mindset. wish that they're going to heal us. Ooh. And they trigger us. Ooh. That's what happens when you have kids. So I say it again? We have an unconscious wish that our kids will heal us. And in reality, our kids trigger us.
Because I think in general, we all have the wish that something... in the external world, something we can gaze out at, will finally give us the comfort and the sense of safety and security that we've always been yearning for.
And part of adulthood, I think, involves learning to gaze in, not from a place of it's my fault, but from a place of actually, like, I have the power, and it's hard, but I have the power to do that myself.
The third thing I want parents to know, and, like, to me, this is... I should have said it's the first thing. I messed up my order.
Start over.
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