'Here are some magical words for your parenting toolbox, and guess what, they’re just as effective with a baby, with a young kid, with a teenager.'
For just over two years, psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy has delivered her remarkably consistent nuggets of parenting advice on Instagram. Few posts are longer than 90 seconds, and she speaks directly into the camera. You might glimpse a patch of soft pink wallpaper or the corner of a child’s drawing in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but there are no plants or artfully messy toys, no windows streaming daylight or glimpses of a propped-out kitchen counter.
Kennedy does not offer guidance on how to swaddle an infant or tout the virtues of breastfeeding; there’s nothing on her feed about nap schedules or the necessity of tummy time. Her advice is pitched at the parents who have passed through the fiery ring of infancy and are now contending with the far thornier challenges of living with a human who can talk and reason and refuse.
run by parenting coaches that she and her staff have trained in what they call the Good Inside method. In two years, she has become something of a cottage industry — what she calls a “movement.”“I think that parents up until this point have been fed incomplete options for the way that they raise their children,” she says. “We want better behavior and there’s a million pushes to get that.
Watson and her group of high-powered Manhattan parents, who coined the title “Dr. Becky” early in their time with Kennedy, met regularly with her for the better part of a decade, beginning when their children were babies and ending when they were in grade school. Watson freely admits she’s not an impartial source on Kennedy. “She’s a very big figure in my life,” the expat Brit says.
Her audience of parents in their 30s and 40s was primed for her approach — not just by the pandemic and the habit of spending hours on social media — but because they are a generation versed in the language of therapy, accustomed to peppering their texts with words like anxiety and triggers and trauma. Parenting has a way of twisting you into something you hardly recognize and didn’t intend. “I always thought of myself as a warm person,” says one mother who follows Kennedy’s advice.
Kennedy, who grew up in Westchester with an older brother and a younger sister, had her own first experience with therapy at age 6 when she was having trouble sleeping. She then sought treatment in high school for anorexia. “Therapy was a part of my life,” she says, “and I loved hearing people talk about their lives, trying to understand what they were going through.” After college, where she met her husband, she went straight to grad school. Her first son was born before she was 30.
“I think that parents have been fed incomplete options for the way that they raise their children,” Kennedy says.I’ll confess I was worried that interviewing Kennedy would be like talking to one of her Instagram videos — with the voice modulation and facial animation — and that I’d find it irritating. But when I visited Kennedy in her sleek temporary office space in Midtown, she was relaxed and self-deprecating, her speech patterns decidedly normal.
There’s a soothing practicality to it. For parents who have struggled to help a child who is anxious or unhappy — or to regulate their own feelings around a frustrated or angry kid — the step-by-step instructions for these thornier emotional moments are a balm. The emphasis on helping your child learn to tolerate their big emotions and interrogate the reasons why they might be frustrated, angry, or apparently unhinged by a request to put their shoes on or do their homework — all the while maintaining a preternatural calm yourself — makes sense in theory, but has left a subset of Kennedy’s audience feeling like they have discovered yet another way to fail.
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