Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be

Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist, a mother of three, and the founder of the Good Inside platform, which offers workshops on parenting, a podcast, and the eponymous book. However, Dr. Kennedy first entered the parenting space on Instagram. Through posts and short videos, she offers bite-sized advice on a range of parenting topics—from what to do when a child throws a tantrum to how to respond to criticism from family about one’s parenting.

Dr. Kennedy’s approach draws on attachment theory and the internal family systems model. Her approach is a version of “respectful parenting” or “gentle parenting” (See: Background). While these approaches are often misunderstood to be synonymous with permissive parenting, Dr. Kennedy makes it clear that her approach is anything but permissive. Rather, she stresses the importance of emotional boundaries and their maintenance by clearly delineating the responsibilities of the parent and the child, respectively. She prioritizes children’s resilience over their happiness, as the former is what will equip the child to deal with everything life hands them. Her approach also stresses that multiple truths can coexist at once, i.e., one is a good parent for holding firm to a boundary, and one’s child is also allowed to be upset about it. This ability to hold two truths is what allows parents to empathize with their child in difficult moments and remember their inner goodness, which is the principle underlying Dr. Kennedy’s approach.

What further distinguishes Dr. Kennedy’s approach from others in the respectful parenting space, such as Janet Lansbury, the author of No Bad Kids (2014), or even fellow Instagram parenting “influencer” account “Big Little Feelings,” is that Dr. Kennedy’s approach focuses on helping parents manage their thoughts and feelings, too (Marchese, David. “Dr. Becky Doesn’t Think the Goal of Parenting Is to Make Your Kid Happy.” The New York Times, 15 Nov. 2021). Dr. Kennedy’s view on parenting is that raising children involves growth and development on the part of both parent and child. One needs to constantly “reparent” oneself while raising children, especially because parents are often triggered by their children when situations bring up unresolved issues from the parents’ own childhoods. Dr. Kennedy herself professes to having had to re-examine the perfectionist tendencies she exhibited growing up (Shafrir, Doree. “Dr. Becky Has Become the Millennial Parenting Whisperer.” Time, 26 June 2021). Perfectionism, incidentally, is a parenting issue Dr. Kennedy addresses in Chapter 26 of the book.

Dr. Kennedy’s approach is most popular amongst millennials, a generation keen to reflect on and better understand the impact of how they were raised. “Helicopter parenting,” the parenting style some millennials experienced as children, has been shown to lead to issues with anxiety and social withdrawal per some studies (Shafrir). Research also indicates that millennials suffer from higher rates of depression and other mental health issues compared to Gen-Xers; “helicopter parenting” is hypothesized to be one of the reasons (Shafrir). As millennials become parents, they also have an increasing number of things to be worried about, from climate change to their children’s social media use. Dr. Kennedy’s advent into the parenting space also occurred at a serendipitous time; she launched her Instagram account in February 2020, just a couple of weeks before the coronavirus pandemic became a global affair. The pandemic led children and their parents to stay home and be in close contact with each other for an extended period of time in unprecedented circumstances. The subsequent increased interest in parenting advice coincided with Dr. Kennedy’s launch, with her first post suggesting ways to talk about the pandemic with children and to help them be resilient in the face of such challenges (Shafrir). The initial post went viral, and the reach of Good Inside has only grown since then.