Good Inside with Dr. Becky

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 depr...

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...

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...

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...

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 i...

“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 a...

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 &mdash...

Parents are being sold creativity like it's a subscription box. Workshops, kits, frameworks, scripts: the message being that your kid needs more imagination and it's your job to install it. Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist and Don't Call It Art, has a different take: your kid already has it. The imagination, the playfulness, the willingness to not-know — it's all there. The question isn't how to give it to them. I...

You and your partner love your kids. So why does it sometimes feel like you're parenting in completely different worlds?

In this listener-favorite episode from the Good Inside archives, Dr. Becky talks with a mom named Carmella who feels stuck between two parenting styles: she's the one holding the routines and boundaries, while her husband tends to be more flexible in the moment. The result? More conflict, more emotional labor, an...

AI is getting better at sounding human. Better at conversation. Better at reassurance. Better at knowing exactly what we want to hear.

So what happens when our kids start building relationships with machines designed to remove friction?

In this conversation, Dr. Becky talks with former Wall Street Journal tech columnist Joanna Stern about AI toys, chatbot companions, creativity, learning, and the surprising role frustration plays i...

After kids, a lot of couples assume intimacy is supposed to disappear. You’re exhausted, touched-out, overwhelmed by logistics, carrying invisible mental load — and somewhere along the way, sex can start to feel complicated, distant, or impossible to even talk about.

But what if the story is more nuanced than that?

In this episode, Dr. Becky talks with board-certified OB/GYN, sexual wellness expert, and Chief Medical Of...

Dr. Becky recently had a run-in with a ... dubious ... purveyor of NeeDohs, the outrageously popular, notoriously hard-to-find squishy toys. And it made her think twice about why this craze has taken over our homes in the first place. So she did what any reasonable person would do: she recorded an emergency podcast episode in her closet. 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about o...

Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson has helped millions of readers understand the lasting impact of emotionally immature parents. In this conversation, she joins Dr. Becky to explore the other side of the equation: how we raise emotionally mature kids.

They discuss why kids’ behavior can feel so activating, the difference between emotions being a “master” versus an “advisor,” why emotional maturity has nothing to do...

For generations, fathers were taught that their job was simple: protect, provide, preside.

But what happens when those old rules no longer fit?

In this conversation, Dr. Becky talks with writer and father Kevin Maguire ("The New Fatherhood") about the emotional transformation happening inside modern fatherhood — and why so many dads are trying to parent differently than they were parented themselves.

They explore:

• why p...

You’ve probably said it—or heard it:

“Nobody knows what they’re doing.”

It’s meant to comfort us as parents. And sometimes it does.
But… is it actually true?

In this episode of our ongoing Is It True? series, Dr. Becky and Myleik Teele take a closer look at this belief—and what might be more helpful to hold onto instead.

They explore:

• Why this idea can feel relieving&helli...

If you’re pregnant… just had a baby… or love someone who is about to become a parent… this episode is for you!

This is a preview of Rattled—a brand-new podcast from Good Inside, created for those early weeks and months of parenthood, when everything feels new, intense, and a little disorienting.

Each episode of Rattled starts with a thought—the kind that shows up at 2 a.m., the kind you don&rs...

People will tell you: a baby changes everything. What no one tells you is how much you change — and how hard it is to love yourself when you don't quite recognize yourself anymore.

In this conversation, Dr. Becky sits down with poet and author Cleo Wade (Remember Love) to talk about what it actually feels like to lose yourself in early parenthood — and what finding your way back looks like. They go deep on postpartum de...

We all grow up playing a role in our family — the responsible one, the easy one, the funny one. For Kenan Thompson, that role started early. In this episode of How We’re Raised, Dr. Becky talks with Kenan about how becoming “the funny one” shaped the way he connects with people — and what it looks like to parent with more intention today. They discuss:

• The connection between humor and emotional s...

Lots of us think screen time is a discipline problem.“My kid just wants more.”“They don’t know when to stop.”“I need to set better limits.”But what if that’s not actually what’s going on?In this episode, Dr. Becky talks with science journalist Michaeleen Doucleff, author of Dopamine Kids, about the brain system driving kids’ behavior around screens—and why more scree...