Dr. Becky Kennedy on self-trust, boundaries and letting kids struggle

Table of Contents
- Liz Tenety: Today we're talking about raising confident kids, which is also about being confident as a parent. What makes you feel more confident as a mom?
- Liz Tenety: You mentioned knowing what your job is. What's the job description for a parent?
- Liz Tenety: Do you see yourself as having been a confident kid?
- Liz Tenety: What do you think is unique about this moment for parents?
- Liz Tenety: Generations of parents have said, "I just want my kid to be happy." What do you make of that?
- Liz Tenety: My middle schooler just found a zero in his grades, and my urge was to say, "Don't worry, we'll go through it together." Letting him struggle felt really bad.
- Liz Tenety: What do those confidence-building moments look like with a baby?
- Liz Tenety: You give us these dream scripts, and none of us nail them. Even Dr. Becky doesn't nail Dr. Becky.
Dr. Becky Kennedy’s daughter once wrote home from summer camp asking for more bikinis, including one from a pricey brand her friends had. By their phone call a few days later, she didn’t care about any of it. For Kennedy, a clinical psychologist and the founder of Good Inside, that exchange says a lot about raising confident kids at a time when parents can fix almost any discomfort with a tap. She defines confidence as self-trust, built in the hard moments we’re most tempted to smooth over. In a candid conversation on The Motherly Podcast, Kennedy opens up about the two jobs every parent has, why “I just want my kid to be happy” falls short and how to support a struggling kid with one foot in and one foot out.
Meet the expert: Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist, the founder and CEO of Good Inside and the author of three New York Times bestsellers. Known to millions of parents simply as Dr. Becky, she teaches an approach built on two core parenting jobs, holding boundaries and validating feelings, and on the idea that kids grow confident by getting through hard moments with support. With Carter’s, she recently launched the Childhood Confidence Project, a free program for parents. A Duke graduate, she lives in New York City with her husband and their three kids.
Liz Tenety: Today we’re talking about raising confident kids, which is also about being confident as a parent. What makes you feel more confident as a mom?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I don’t ever assume I have the right answer. This might sound weird. I’m not that attached to the right answer. I’m very attached to having a way to think through problems, and it makes me think about the difference in the question “What do I do? What am I gonna say?” versus “What’s really going on here? What’s my job?” Those are very different questions. I think confidence as a parent for me comes from having a repeatable way to think through hard moments. I think the thing that takes away from our confidence as parents is in every hard moment with our kid, we feel like we’re starting over. And I think that’s the thing that gives me confidence, is not knowing I can handle any situation well, but feeling like I can think through it.
Liz Tenety: You mentioned knowing what your job is. What’s the job description for a parent?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I think a parent has two jobs, almost always. One job is to set boundaries. It’s the piece that we’re missing in modern-day parenting. We’ve over-corrected. Boundaries are decisions I make with my kid that almost inherently they don’t like today but are actually good for the type of person they need to become tomorrow. And boundaries are things we tell our kid we will do, and they require our kid to do nothing. We often think we’re setting a boundary when we’re actually making a request. “Please stop jumping on the couch. Don’t hit your brother.” Those are requests. Those are not boundaries. A boundary is an assertion of my very appropriate authority. The other part of our job is staying connected to our kids and validating their feelings, which doesn’t mean agreeing, which doesn’t mean letting their feelings dictate our behavior. But just seeing their feelings as real. Those two jobs answer, I think, kids’ questions that they’re always unconsciously asking. Am I safe and am I real?
Liz Tenety: Do you see yourself as having been a confident kid?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I don’t think confidence is feeling good about yourself all the time. I think confidence is self-trust. I always tell parents it’s actually not feeling like the best. It’s trusting it’s okay to be you when you’re not the best, ironically. So was I the kind of kid going through childhood who trusted myself, who felt like I was okay being me even when something was really hard? No. I was a really perfectionistic kid. I was a kid who probably growing up had enough external success, good grades, A team in soccer, all that, that I could use external outcomes as a way of feeling good. We know it works sometimes in childhood, and then it catches up to you and crashes big time. When we think about kids who are so just oriented towards success, in a way, we’re setting them up to have a shrinking life. I want my kids to have a wide range of situations. I want them to say, “Yeah, I’m trying out for that team. Sure, I might not make it, but let’s see.” That’s confidence.
Liz Tenety: What do you think is unique about this moment for parents?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: This might sound funny. It has never been easier as a parent to make our kids’ life easier. And I think that is the biggest problem we have with confidence and resilience. You see someone have something, it’s a natural human urge to be like, “I need that right away.” We are doing such an insane disservice to our kids by pairing what happens to be the peak urge with the ability to get the thing in the moment. I saw this with my own daughter. She was away for a little bit in the summer. She wrote me a handwritten letter. “I don’t have enough bikinis. Could you send me two of the ones I left at home?” And then she said, “And a lot of my friends have this brand. Maybe it’s too expensive, but I would love one of those.” I knew I was talking to her in a couple days. At the end of the call, I said, “Hey, by the way, you haven’t brought up bikinis.” This is what she says: “Oh, yeah, I don’t need those. It’s fine.” I can’t even tell you what this did for me in my parenting. Just having time allowed her urge and her panic to subside that she didn’t even care. And because it’s never been easier to remove those things, it has never been harder to raise an actually capable, confident, resilient kid.
Liz Tenety: Generations of parents have said, “I just want my kid to be happy.” What do you make of that?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: People will say this in passing. We’re talking about our kids at a dinner and someone’s like, “I just want my kid to be happy.” And I’m sure my husband always looks at me like, “Just don’t. Please, just let this pass.” And sometimes I do, but sometimes I’m like, “No, we don’t.” I don’t think our job is to make our kids happy. I actually would say that if you’re operating even unconsciously as if that is your job, you’re setting your kid up not for happiness, but, if I say it as directly as I think it, you’re setting your kid up for a ton of anxiety and fragility. Because so much of capability in adulthood comes from the range of situations we learned to handle in childhood. Three of my best friends were in the same class in second grade, and I wasn’t. Now, do I think when my kid is 40, they’re gonna be thinking about who’s in their class? 0%. But it’s not about the class, it’s about the circuit. And you know what’s gonna happen when I’m 40? I’m gonna see a group of moms at lunch without me. I’m gonna see a group of people at work get promoted before me. We have to be able to handle jealousy and sadness and being left out for there to be room for happy.
Liz Tenety: My middle schooler just found a zero in his grades, and my urge was to say, “Don’t worry, we’ll go through it together.” Letting him struggle felt really bad.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: I just wanna zone in on that moment, your kid gets a zero, because again, we tend to think in extremes. No part of me thinks you should be in that car ride being like, “Sucks. Yep, zero sucks. Yep, figure it out.” There’s just a lot between that. And it’s interesting, the phrase, “I don’t want you to worry about that.” I think what we’re trying to say is, “I don’t want you to take this moment and feel like that’s just defined who you are.” But I do want you to worry a little. When our kid is in a hard situation, you don’t wanna leave them alone, and you don’t wanna fully jump in. I think you want one foot in and one foot out. One foot in would be saying, “Ugh, you weren’t expecting that. You didn’t want that to happen. Well, that’s a bummer on this Thursday car ride.” Whatever’s just the truth. And the one foot out is sometimes words, and it’s usually after some time, which is, “All right. This is recoverable. One number doesn’t change anything about you. You’re the same smart, awesome, responsible kid before the zero as you were after the zero.”
Liz Tenety: What do those confidence-building moments look like with a baby?
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Think about tummy time. Tummy time is one of the first times your baby is telling you, “Me no likey.” My job isn’t to remove all moments of discomfort for my baby. Now again, we go to the other extreme. “Oh, so you’re saying you just leave a baby crying?” No, I would never do that. But we’ve started to confuse, at all ages, giving comfort with making kids comfortable. They’re completely different things. My job is to provide comfort. My job is not to always make my kid comfortable. Okay, I’m gonna do tummy time. My baby might whine a little bit, cry a little bit. I’m gonna get next to my baby. “Oh, you’re right. This is hard. Oh, you’d rather be on your back. Oh, you know what? We’re gonna do 10 more seconds together, and I am right here with you. I know you can do it. You are doing it. Oh, you did it. I’m giving you a big hug. You did something so tricky.”
Liz Tenety: You give us these dream scripts, and none of us nail them. Even Dr. Becky doesn’t nail Dr. Becky.
Dr. Becky Kennedy: The scripts are helpful to talk about because ideas that are theoretical aren’t that usable. But where scripts are limiting is, I’m not a script person. I really mean that. I saw a comment, she goes, “Me and my husband, in any hard situation, look at each other and we say WWDBD.” What would Dr. Becky do? Now, the reason I love that is completely different than why I think people would think I love it. This actually has nothing to do with me. If you’re in a hard situation and you say, “What would Dr. Becky do?” That’s not my voice. I’m literally not there with you. That is your voice. Having a method, having a way of thinking through something. And that, to me, more than a perfect script, that is the most confidence-building thing as a parent.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen to the full conversation on the Motherly Podcast.
















































































