Good Inside with Dr. Becky

Your kid hits. Melts down the second you leave the house. Argues about everything, all day, every single day. You've tried the time-outs, the consequences, the calm-down corner. Nothing works. Why are we always at that cliff?

Dr. Becky spent two hours in a Reddit thread literally called "Nothing Works" and pulled three real posts to build this episode. Her answer: you're intervening at the cliff, when the real leverage is on the road that led there. She walks through the exact minute-by-minute buildup (the snack request, the "just one more minute," the phone glance) where a parent could've exited before the blowup, plus scripts you can actually use.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Pampers Easy Ups: Start your potty training journey with Peppa Pig Pampers Easy Ups

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What does depression look like? It’s not always… sadness. It can be anger. Irritability. Picking fights. Checking out. Taking risks that don't make sense. It can look, to everyone around you — including you — like a character problem, not a medical condition.

Christopher Choukalas is an ICU physician at UCSF. Six months after his twin daughters were born, he had every symptom on the paternal postpartum depression list. He had no idea.

In this episode, Dr. Becky and Dr. Choukalas go through the symptom list live — and talk about why this form of depression is so easy to miss, what it costs the whole family when it goes unnamed, and what getting help actually looked like for one father who needed it badly.

Christopher G. Choukalas, MD, MS is the author of Even the Darkest Night: A Father's Journey of Hope and Healing from Paternal Depression.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today

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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What happens when two become three, or four, or five? Who is responsible for the needs and wants of a couple when days are filled with playdates, pick-ups, and meal preps? Nights lack the erotic energy that couples need not only to survive but to thrive. This week, Dr. Becky consults with the renowned couples therapist, Esther Perel, to talk about what parents can do to rekindle their desires.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today

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

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

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

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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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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

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

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

Pampers Easy Ups: Start your potty training journey with Peppa Pig Pampers Easy Ups

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

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

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.

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

SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today

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

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