How Dr. Becky created a pocket-sized parenting coach

Dr. Becky Kennedy, a New York City-based clinical psychologist who coaches parents through difficult moments with their kids, has created a booming business centered on the notion that kids are, essentially, good people. The idea sounds simple, but to Kennedy, it’s profound—the key to unlocking healthy parent-child relationships. And that insight, which Kennedy has developed into the Good Inside method, has turned “Dr. Becky” from prominent psychologist into a celebrity-status parenting guru.

Early in her career, Kennedy embraced what she calls a “behavior-first, reward-and-punishment” approach to parenting. But she came to understand that the method, which emphasizes discipline and consequences, doesn’t help children develop the skills they need to handle complicated emotional situations. So, Kennedy came up with an entirely new framework.

The basic idea of Good Inside is that children act out when they feel misunderstood or their needs aren’t being met—that their bad behavior doesn’t reflect their inherent character. And parents who approach them through this perspective are better able to set boundaries and develop healthy relationships with their children.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Kennedy joined Instagram to dispense advice to parents struggling with their suddenly trapped-at-home children. Dr. Becky soon became a social media sensation: She currently has more than 3 million Instagram followers and a growing presence on TikTok. In the meantime, she’s spun her Good Inside brand into a bestselling book, a podcast, and a subscription-based app, which launched last year and uses generative AI trained on Kennedy’s writing and videos to give parents personalized, specific advice to deal with situations in real time. The Good Inside app, which costs $276 a year, now counts more than 50,000 members.

Fast Company spoke to Kennedy about her approach to empowering parents, using generative AI and social media to spread her message, and growing the Good Inside brand.

What made you join Instagram in 2020?

I started to see that we create issues in childhood and then we try to solve them in adulthood. When I noticed this, I couldn’t unthink it. I’m always focused on efficiency. I think what led me to Instagram was the thought that more people need to know this. More people need access to the type of education that you get in every other job.

Parenting is the hardest job in the world, and we are sold this bullshit narrative that we should have a maternal instinct and that it should come naturally. The only thing that comes naturally in parenting is how you were parented. Technology is now being used to solve a lot of the world’s struggles and make certain things easier. Where’s the education and the technology for parents?

I want parents to say, “I feel like I have the best parenting coach in the world in my pocket. I shouldn’t spiral after I yell at my kid. It shouldn’t be a mystery what to say when my kid comes home after getting in trouble at school.” 

Is that why you developed the Good Inside app?

We grew completely organically on Instagram. Parents have basically told us along the way what they want, and we’re just serving it up for them. They want education. They want access to experts and access to each other so they know they’re not alone.

With that kind of insight we’re like, okay, we are going to create this ongoing experience. The app has a subscription model because if you’re a parent with kids, they are often living in your home for 18 years. We just want to be with people on their journey. We have more than 50,000 members in over 108 countries, even though we’re still just English-speaking.

We heard from parents during [the pandemic] that they wanted longer content. But now they are on the go and need advice for very specific situations, so it needs to be personalized. So when someone only has five minutes, they can feel productive.

This is really a digital product, just like Duolingo. We want parents to have a way to learn the language of parenting. Parents can type in a specific situation, and get practical advice on what they can do tailored to them using generative AI. They can also delve deeper and learn more if they want to.

What is the overarching theory behind Good Inside, and how did you come to it?

This all came together in my private practice. I’d work with adults, and I felt like there was one thing that was true about everyone, regardless of what they came to talk about. It’s that the patterns and the circuitry that were put in our bodies to protect us and help us adapt early on in life start to work against us in adulthood. A lot of our early childhood adaptations ironically become symptoms in adulthood. [People wonder], Why don’t I trust people? I’m so hypervigilant. I don’t think I was born that way. So what did I learn early on that made me untrusting?

I used to tell adults that the circuits that were put in place to protect us are hard to unwind because our body thinks it’s helping us. So I’d work with adults in helping them understand why they do things they do. That’s the first step, because we can’t intervene before we understand.

How does this theory apply to parenting?

I’d see parents of a four-year-old, they’d be like, “My kid is hitting, and I don’t know what to do.” I’d say to them what I was taught, which was to tell their kid, “We’re going to do a timeout.” Then take away their dessert and give them a sticker every time they don’t hit their friend.

But then I pictured doing this with the adults I’d see in my practice: Them saying, “I yelled at someone at work,” and me being like, “Give me your phone, and by the way, you didn’t hit someone yesterday, so here’s a sticker.” In that scenario, they’d reply, “Why would taking away my phone help me stay calm? I think you just made me feel worse.” Nobody would come back to my office.

No good CEOs make employees better by punishing them. But we’ve been doing this to kids for generations. We think, I’m punishing my kid and I tell myself that’s being in charge. But punishing is a sign of desperation, not authority. Good Inside is an approach for someone who can say, “I need to own my parental authority.”

What do you advise parents to do in this scenario instead?

First, I have to set a true boundary. I would go to my kid and say, “I’m not going to let you hit.” When I did that, I’d actually hold their wrist or get in between them and the other kid. This is the opposite of what a lot of us do as parents. Many parents might say, “Okay, stop hitting,” or we do something weird and say, “I’m going to count to three.” It doesn’t make any sense. I would never say, “I’m going to count to three and I hope you don’t run into oncoming traffic.” I would just not let my kid run into oncoming traffic. That is what I call setting a boundary and embodying your authority.

After I set a boundary, I’d say something to stay connected to my kid and see the good inside them. Something like, “Hey, you’re allowed to be mad. Your sister’s playing with your favorite truck. But let’s figure out another way you can communicate that.”

What does this method teach kids?

Big picture: Nobody learns skills for better behavior by going to their room. I don’t know a four-year-old who’s like, “Oh, let me search on the internet what to do the next time I’m mad so I don’t hit.” A four-year-old is feeling ashamed. They feel like a bad kid. Ironically, their feelings are going to be harder to manage and they’re more likely to hit tomorrow. Good Inside separates who you are from what you do—not to let you off the hook, but to provide a foundation to build skills and to improve behavior.

What if parents say, “I have a four-year-old, they’re not going to understand that”?

They will understand. They’ll understand that you set a boundary to stop them from acting out. They finally feel like they have an adult in the room keeping them safe. And they’ll understand that you’re looking at them. They’re a good person having a hard time, not a bad kid doing bad things. That difference is massive.

People often use the word “boundary” to express something that others should react to. But in your definition, it sounds like a boundary is something that requires nothing of the other person.

Often we say we’re setting a boundary when in fact we’re just making a request. Parents say, “I set a boundary, and my kid’s not respecting it.” Whenever I hear that, I think someone has an incorrect definition of a boundary.

My definition of a boundary, whether you’re a parent or not, is something you tell someone you will do. It requires the other person to do nothing. A boundary might look like you saying to your kid, “Hey, I’m going to walk over to you, and if things aren’t calm by the time I get there, I’m picking you up and I’m carrying you to your room. Because my No. 1 job is to keep you safe, and hitting isn’t safe and you’re clearly not capable of making good decisions right now.” 

When a parent says, “I’m going to literally hold you to stop hitting your friend,” other parents on the playground might watch that and think, what the hell are they doing? What’s the best way to respond in that scenario?

I think you’re asking a bigger question: How much of my time do I spend in other people’s brains thinking about what they think about me? And how much of my time do I spend in my own brain gazing in and thinking about what I want and need? What’s really sad—and this is what happens to a lot of women because we’re trained to gaze out before we gaze in—is we don’t even really know what we want to do anymore.

One of the biggest things we do at Good Inside is empower parents to be the sturdiest, most healed version of themselves, which is the most important thing they can do to help their kids.

So how do parents use the app? For instance, what if I had a kid, and they spilled a glass or water and screamed about it for an hour. How would the app help me?

Let’s do it right now. I’m typing the scenario into the app. Want me to read to you what it said?

That sounds really intense. Kids often have big reactions to small accidents because they feel overwhelmed, and don’t know how to manage that. Your kid probably felt a mix of surprise, frustration, and maybe even fear of the mess, which led to that hour-long scream fest. In moments like this, start by just acknowledging what’s happening, acknowledge the surprise, not just the feeling, wow, that was a surprise. Then they’ll probably start to calm down and you can guide them through cleaning up together. This not only helps them learn to manage the situation, it also reinforces that mistakes happen and it’s okay to feel upset. Remember, you’re really helping your kid learn how to navigate big feelings.

Then we have the next step for you if you want it. We have a primer to kids who are overly emotional. It’s a little bit longer, but it’ll take you one level deeper if that’s what you’re looking for.

How did you develop AI tools that can deliver these kinds of responses?

It took a year. I worked with an amazing clinical team of people who are trained in the Good Inside approach and our amazing machine-learning engineers. In terms of the content itself, I have a produced a lot, so it’s trained on that.

The app costs almost $25 a month. How did you think about that pricing strategy?

We think about things as expensive or cheap relative to what we’re comparing it to. If people compare our app to free reels on Instagram, they’d think it’s expensive. We have a lot of members who say, “This is transforming my life at $25 a month. I pay way more than that in copays for my in-network therapist. My copays add up to over a hundred dollars a month.” So, this actually feels incredibly reasonable. Nobody values their own mental health or their kids’ mental health as low on their list, and yet sometimes I think when we look at where we invest money, there’s a lot of other things we place above that. When you compare the price point to anything else that involves mental wellness, I think the value you get far exceeds the value you’re investing.

Is it ever too late for someone to change their parenting style?

Everything in our app, in our membership, in our company is based on the belief that it is not too late. We underestimate how much our bodies accept repair. We are all looking for the compassion and understanding that we never got.

I think when parents say, “Is it too late?” They’re kind of saying, “Have I lost the ability to stay calm, to feel good about myself, to feel confident that I can handle hard challenges with uncertainty?” I want to give that person a hug. I know it sounds cheesy, but I want them to feel the strength of my conviction in saying, “No.”

Will the journey be easy? Will everything change tomorrow? No way. But as long as it takes for our circuitry to build, it doesn’t take that same amount of time for it to unwind. We need a guide, we need some powerful ideas. We definitely need some practical, actionable strategies and many experiments. I think that’s what I’m most proud of. At Good Inside, we change a parent even more than their parenting.