I have a bone to pick with momfluencers, AKA anyone brave enough to speak directly to a camera: Y’all are giving off hard “I do this right, I got this” vibes. Even — hate to say it because bless her helpful, honest soul! — Dr. Becky.
Granted, the New York City mother of three is quite a bit more qualified than whoever shows up in your next Reel: Dr. Becky (Kennedy, for those who are uninitiated) has a PhD in clinical psychology and wrote The New York Times best-selling book Good Inside: The Practical Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be. She runs the eponymous million-plus member global community mostly made up of moms just trying to get through their days without royally f*cking up their kids or drowning in guilt. Her advice is somewhat of a religion, with mothers reciting her mantras and fathers becoming her followers. (Last I checked? Almost three million people follow her Instagram page.) With so many of us out here desperate for advice to do better by our kids, it’s no wonder Dr. Becky recently teamed up with NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, PhD, author of The Anxious Generation, on a parenting guide to help all of us chill out.
But as an avid disciple of Dr. Becky, follower of so.many.other IG parenting accounts, and mom who — four and a half years in — is still figuring this whole child-rearing thing out, I always wonder what kind of chaos is going on between these parenting experts’ camera cuts. Do they actually follow their own advice behind closed doors as they juggle work and sleep and clutter and crazy schedules and some semblance of self/social life?
So, I went to our generation’s Dr. Spock and asked her.
Scary Mommy: Is there any parenting advice you’ve given but not followed?
Dr. Becky: There is so much of my own parenting advice that I don’t always follow! And I think the biggest explanation is that my kids have Becky as a mom, not Dr. Becky. I think two things are true with so many things: There are parenting ideas and principals and foundations to hold on to, and what’s equally true is that no parent, Dr. Becky included, is going to do all of this all the time. To me, it’s about doing some of it more often and having something to come back to when things feel really hard. So of course there are times when I lose it, or I yell, or I say, ‘I said no ice cream! But fine, I just don’t want to deal with the meltdown.’ But what I think is really important here is I don’t ever see that as a personal failure.
SM: What specific advice do you frequently give but struggle to adopt yourself, and what makes it challenging?
DB: ‘Sit, don’t fix.’ You picture your kid on this bench, like the bench of ‘I was left out’ or the bench of ‘I’m jealous.’ The bench of ‘I’m the only one in my class who can’t read.’ The bench of something uncomfortable. I know that what really builds kids’ resilience is when they have someone around them who sits on that bench with them — someone who says, I’m not afraid of this feeling; I’m less afraid of it than you are. I still like you. I’m still willing to be close to you when you’re having this feeling, as opposed to kind of trying to pull the kid off the bench, which ironically makes them more scared of their feelings and leads to a lot of anxiety later in life.
I talk about this all the time because I need to hear it all the time — I’m naturally a person of action. I love to fix things. I notice my own urge to want to offer a quick solution to my kid.
SM: You often say it’s not a parent’s job to make their kids happy. As a mom, do you actually believe this?
DB: I really, really do believe this as a mom. When I think about my kid being upset because we’re walking by a toy store and we don’t go in, when I think about my kid who recently had to spend a couple of days on a school project they didn’t want to do without any of their close friends, what I really do think about is that there are going to be so many times in my kids’ lives when they are older that they want something and they don’t have it. Their friends have something they don’t have, or they don’t get their first choice — those things happen all the time. And in those moments, one of the things that I try to say to myself is, Becky, this moment is not going to be enjoyable. My kid is in pain, so I’m in pain, but this is a very high-impact moment. If I can be there for my kid, not fix it, not end it, what I’m really doing is helping my kid build the coping skills they are going to need for life. That, to me, is really, really powerful.
When you just try to make your kid happy, you optimize for short-term comfort, but I think instead about optimizing for long-term resilience. Now again, do I follow this all the time? Of course not. I’m human. But I don’t think these things are 100% or bust. It’s about finding principals that make sense, then trying to put them into practice a little bit more often.”
SM: What’s it like to parent in public as one of our generation’s foremost parenting experts? What pressures do you feel to get it right?
DB: I haven’t ever introduced myself as a parenting expert. There’s something about the word expert that I never quite feels right, like it’s an end-point and feels almost anti-learning, whereas what brought me to this work and keeps me going is learning something new every day.
I genuinely mean this: I don’t feel pressure about parenting in public. The Good Inside approach to parenting is not about perfect parenting. The single most important strategy a parent should have in their toolbox is repair, and the only way to get good at repair is to rupture, to mess up. So if someone saw me in public and my kid was having a tantrum, literally I would say, ‘I’m so glad you see this. Kids have tantrums, my kids, your kids, everyone.’ I think about myself as a pilot, where I don’t feel judged for going through turbulence.
If someone in public saw me yell at my kid or say something I wish I could take back and said, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s Dr. Becky yelling at her kid,’ I don’t think I would run into a corner. I would go over and say, ‘Yeah, that was a hard moment. And I’m going to repair things later. I’m just like you. I’m in this. This is hard. The best it gets is working on things, repairing, and going back to working on things again.’
