Dr Becky Kennedy became Instagram's favourite 'parent whisperer' almost by accident.
What started out as a useful tip in one of her early Instagram posts - where she called on parents to remember kids were watching them deal with uncertainty during Covid-19 - helped propel the New York-based clinical psychologist (and mother of three) into a parenting phenomenon.
Time magazine went as far as describing 'Dr Becky' - as she's known online - as the 'Millennial parent whisperer'.
Photo: Dr Becky Kennedy
Kennedy’s company Good Inside now has over a million followers from all over the world, including a large New Zealand contingent, and a hit podcast.
She believes her first Instagram post went viral because it not only resonated with parents, but it gave them a light bulb moment with strategies on how to act.
“Often parents tell us ‘wow, once I saw something differently, I couldn’t unsee it’. But then parents need to know how to implement so then we take a reframe and we translate it into an action.
“Then we get one more level specific and say, here are the exact words and I think the scripts are so powerful to parents, because to me it’s like the wedge that opens a door to the room you want to walk into.”
But it all started out after Kennedy, who trained in both child and adult psychology, opened a therapy clinic for adults.
She saw a pattern of people with detrimental behaviours, which they had developed as children in order to adapt to their parents and their way of raising them.
“I just kept thinking, oh, if I could reverse engineer this knowledge to today’s parents, we could get ahead of this curve, like we could actually help kids adapt early on in ways that were adaptive.
“Then when I had my own kids, I really wanted to connect more with parents … so I said okay I’m going to get additional training in parenting, and I did, I really learned this incredible behavioural system, it was kind of ‘gold-standard’ and ‘evidence-based’ and all about timeouts, rewards, sticker charts, punishments, and ignoring and shaping and all that.”
She liked it at first, she says, because as parents get overwhelmed, they come to prefer these clear and “logical” strategies.
“No joke, I was mid-session with someone talking to them how to give a timeout and I literally said ‘I’m sorry, I actually don’t believe anything I’m telling you … I know this isn’t it because I would never do this to my own kids so I’m going to refund you and like maybe come back in a couple of weeks and I’m going to try and develop a system that’s as concrete’.
“So I remember thinking I’m going to make a system with strategies and scripts, that’s as clear as all these behavioural systems but is based on principles of attachment, internal family systems, schematic-based psychotherapy, and mindfulness and all the things that I know works for adults and the stuff that also feels good.”
Good Inside tries to help parents find the right balance between mitigating bad behaviour and being empathetic toward children, she says.
“[The reward and punishment parenting model] makes sense to our logic system … but it just misses that we’re not trying to shape behaviour. We’re trying to raise humans.
“The other thing that comes to mind is the opposite mode of parenting that I think some parents right now are raised with too. It wasn’t just the rewards and punishments, it was kind of the ‘anything goes’ and ‘I want my kid to be my friend because my parents were so harsh’, that also doesn’t work.
“Yes, they need empathy and they need validation, but they also need firm boundaries, which is not the same thing as scary boundaries, they need both.”
And one of the prime complaints from parents has been that their child doesn’t listen to them.
“They’re playing with something and then when it’s time to clean up and then they resist, we think oh my God, my kid doesn’t respect me, my kid has a listening problem.”
But switch the roles and see how it feels doing the same to an adult, she says.
“If I was sitting on the couch after my three kids were finally asleep and I had 30 seconds of downtime before I passed out or something, and I was like reading a book and my husband was also on the couch and he said, even nicely, ‘Becky, could you please go get me a water from the kitchen?’
“If I said, ‘hey like we’re both sitting down, can you go get yourself water?’
“Imagine your partner then turning to you and saying, you know what, you have a listening problem and you can’t watch TV for a week.”
This is what parents do to kids all the time, she says, and these examples are important because it helps us have another light bulb moment that our kids are only humans like us.
“I think when we ground ourselves in ‘what’s the equivalent situation for me’ it helps us have empathy. It helps us have empathy and it helps us realise that our kids need that kind of same connection capital as we would need with anyone close to us in our life.”
In gaining a new perspective, parents have noticed they’ve changed even more so than their children sometimes, Kennedy says.
