Good Inside with Dr. Becky

Belle Burden was, by her own account, the good girl. Quiet, compliant, the kid who wrote her own book report and did her homework on Friday afternoons. Then one night in the second week of the 2020 lockdown, a stranger left a voicemail: your husband is having an affair with my wife. By 6 a.m. her 20-year marriage was over, and the life she thought she could count on stopped making sense.

In her memoir of the event and its aftermath, Strangers, Belle traces how she got to this place - and how she found her way back.

They get into the stuff we all carry: why "being good" can quietly cost you yourself, how kids notice far more than we give them credit for, and why it's never too late to tell them the truth.

Dr. Becky wrote up her thoughts on how to get the "good girl" tendency out of your own emotional driver seat.

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There's a lot of noise about what AI will do to jobs. What will it do to one of the most important jobs in the world: parenting? 

Dr. Dana Suskind is a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon and neuroscientist who has spent her career on how young brains get built. In this conversation, she and Dr. Becky start with a piece of bait — can a parent be replaced by a machine? — and spend the next half hour on the science of why the answer is no.

They get into attachment and why the messy, inconvenient, friction-filled version of connection is the version that actually wires a child's brain. Why a frictionless AI that always agrees with you might be the real risk. A rubric (DETECT) for judging any piece of kid-facing tech before it comes in the house. And the idea Dana calls the most freeing thing she learned writing her new book: good-enough parenting isn't a nice thing to say, it's a biological necessity.

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When a woman becomes a mother, her brain physically reorganizes around the baby. We've known this for a while. What we didn't know (until recently) is that the same thing happens to dads.

Dr. Darby Saxbe is a neuroscientist and psychologist at USC, and one of the only researchers in the world scanning fathers' brains before and after they have kids. What she found: the same regions that change and streamline in new mothers change in new fathers. The more hands-on a dad is, the more pronounced those changes are.

Dr. Becky and Dr. Darby get into what "losing gray matter" actually means (it's not what it sounds like), how paternal postpartum depression shows up differently than maternal (and why it almost always goes unrecognized), and why the awkwardness of new fatherhood isn't a signal that you're wrong for the role.

Dr. Saxbe's new book is Dad Brain.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Skylight: Get $30 off a 15-inch Skylight Calendar at myskylight.com/becky

LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside

Girl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn more

Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED

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“If I don’t push my kid, they’ll waste their potential.” A lot of us believe this. But is it true?

Myleik Teele joins Dr. Becky to work through a question that haunts every ambitious parent. What unfolds is an honest look at whose anxiety is actually running the show — and whether the drive we're trying to install in our kids is something we need to figure out for ourselves first.

They get into: what ability vs. effort actually predicts about your kid's future, the moment Myleik saw a straight-A report card and felt something twist inside her, and the specific pressure Black parents carry into every one of these conversations.

Dr. Becky wrote up some conversation starters that might help if you're worried your kid isn't reaching their full potential. 

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Ole Henriksen: Use the code DRBECKY30 for 30% off the Banana Bright+ Eye Crème

LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside

Girl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn more.

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Dr. Cassidy Freitas grew up watching her mom — a Hispanic judge who fought her way into white male spaces with no margin for error — come home carrying that same no-error version of herself. Her dad pushed straight A's as the path to financial safety. She absorbed all of it.

And then she became a mom.

She had a plan. A written, formatted, shared-with-her-doctor birth plan. When it fell apart in the operating room — her daughter already here, her husband saying "look at her," and Cassidy turning her face away — the drive that had gotten her through everything else had nothing to offer her.

Dr. Cassidy is a therapist and the author of Mom Needs a Moment. In this conversation with Dr. Becky, she traces how perfectionism forms in childhood as a survival strategy, why it works right up until you have a baby, and what it actually looks like to loosen the grip without losing your edge.

There's a phrase she comes back to: context is the bridge to compassion. You can't have compassion for the way perfectionism shows up in you as a mom if you don't understand where it came from.

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Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood.

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Ole Henriksen: Use the code DRBECKY30 for 30% off the Banana Bright+ Eye Crème

Airbnb: Host your home or book your next stay on Airbnb

Coterie: Get 20% off with the code GOODINSIDEBABY20

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.