44 The Times Magazine’m going to tell her that you said the
f-word at us,” says Isaac, my six-year-old
son, the morning we are visited by
Dr Becky, the internet’s favourite
parenting expert.
“Of course. Tell her anything you
want, darling,” I say brightly, trying not
to wince, recalling the evening he
referred to.
It was the culmination of a chaotic
afternoon with Isaac and his younger brother,
three-year-old Eli, when my husband, Evan,
was working late and I was outnumbered by
little people. There were arguments about
gloves, hats and coats (“Not that jacket! It
makes me squashed!”), followed by dinner-
table meltdowns (the once reliable vegetarian
chilli I had spent an hour cooking was
suddenly deemed “disgusting”). At bath time,
both kids ignored my protests and splashed
me in the face repeatedly. Then Eli had
refused to brush his teeth or to put on
his pyjamas; Isaac had started swinging
dangerously from the side of their bunk bed. It
was then – as I pulled Isaac down to the floor
and then chased Eli, brandishing a night-time
nappy that he would not put on – that I said
the f-word at them. OK, yelled it. At which
point Eli wailed, “I don’t like it when people
shout at me.”
After that, my status as the worst person
in the world was confirmed when Isaac said,
in a devastating whisper, “Mum. You’re not
supposed to say words like that.” Then he
shook his head slowly. He was not angry;
he was just disappointed.
Before I had kids, I could not imagine
such scenes playing out in my house. But now
I understand how sleep deprivation and a pile
of washing you won’t get to the bottom of
until you die can change a person. And that
was before Covid and almost two years of
home schooling, quarantines and socially
distanced playdates in freezing, muddy
playgrounds. During these past 23 frazzled,
uncertain months, even the most saintly,
resilient parents seemed to be losing it.
Parents need advice more than ever before,
which goes some way to explaining the Dr
Becky phenomenon. Dr Becky Kennedy, 38,
is a clinical psychologist and mother of
three who started posting parenting tips
on Instagram in February 2020. She had
200 followers when an early post about
“modelling resilience” during coronavirus
went viral. Now she has 988,000 Instagram
followers, including half of Hollywood (Blake
Lively, Ryan Reynolds, Zoe Saldana, Emmy
Rossum, Kate Upton, Eva Mendes and Gigi
Hadid). She has a podcast; her book comes out
later this year; her company, Good Inside, is
developing a “Netflix for parenting” platform
where devotees can watch workshops and chat
about the techniques with like-minded parents.Parents love Dr Becky because her content
is deep but pithy (sometimes a 60-second
video is all my addled brain can take),
relatable and smart. She is also part of
a burgeoning movement – popular with
millennial parents in particular – some call
“respectful” or “gentle” parenting (though Dr
Becky does not use these labels herself). This
approach does not advocate punishments – no
“timeouts” or being sent to your room – even
when a child has been violent, but focuses on
intercepting and preventing bad behaviour
before it happens. Sticker charts, effusive
praise and bribery are off the table too;
parents are encouraged to validate their
children’s feelings – to say, “Oh, you’re sad.
You didn’t want that to happen,” if a child is
disappointed because, say, you cut up their
toast when they wanted it whole, rather than,
“It’s no big deal,” or, “Why are you being so
ungrateful?” It’s a new parenting paradigm
for a new generation, a once niche perspective
that Dr Becky is taking mainstream, which is
why Time magazine recently called her “the
Millennial Parenting Whisperer”.
Surely if anyone can help me it is Dr
Becky, I thought, recalling the many strained
days when I had felt slightly better after
watching her 60-second videos on Instagram.
My husband is not one to watch therapy-
adjacent parenting videos on Instagram of an
evening (that’s not to say he’s an oaf: he way
outperforms me in cooking, cleaning and
panic-ordering children’s equipment on theinternet, thank goodness), so it will be me
alone embarking on this experiment today.
Once I am improved, I figure I can also subtly
improve him.
And now here she is at my front door,
Dr Becky in the flesh, a soothsayer in skinny
jeans and fawn-coloured ankle boots, exactly
as I imagined she would be. She wears a chic
but understated grey jumper and blow-dried- but not overly coiffed – highlighted hair.
Everything about her is reassuring. And while
Isaac and Eli gravitate towards her, it is me
she needs to deal with. My time with her
today will be just like a session she would
have with a patient in her clinic, she explains:
not a magic fix, more’s the pity, but a starting
point to help me feel better about parenting
in the long run.
She explains her approach, which was
inspired by adults in her private practice.
She noticed that the symptoms adults
struggle with “are usually adaptations in
childhood – ways in which kids adapt to
family systems and figure out how to get
love, get connection” that hold them back
later in life. “So I remember thinking, what if
I took all the information and kind of reverse
engineered it back to today’s parents, because
then we could help kids wire and adapt early
on in ways that stayed adaptive,” she says.
Now that she is trapped at my kitchen
table I start telling her my problems:
about our family’s complicated year, with
bereavement, a house move and a change
‘
I
She has been called the
Millennial Parenting
Whisperer. Netflix has
signed her up
AARON RICHTER