Chris Voss is a former FBI lead kidnapping negotiator, bestselling author of Never Split The Difference, and founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group; a negotiation, training, coaching, and consulting organization that teaches people how to achieve better outcomes in high-stakes conversations. Today, he teaches some of these same skills to parents - and it turns out the thing that gets a hostage-taker to put down a weapon isn't that different from what gets your eight-year-old to put down the tablet.

Obviously, kids aren’t actual hostage-takers, but in this conversation, Chris and Dr. Becky get into why kids saying "no" is actually a sign of a healthy nervous system, not defiance. Why "how was your day" always gets you "fine," and the one-word fix that doesn't. Why asking your kid "why" almost always backfires, and what to ask instead. And the reframe Chris uses with his own team to get a reluctant partner, coworker, or teenager to actually engage: "are you against this?"

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Frida: Shop Frida at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today
• Airbnb: Host your home or book your next stay on Airbnb
• SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today
• Care.com: For a limited time, you can use the code BECKY35 to save 35% on a Care.com Premium Membership.*
• Offer applies to initial term of Care.com membership subscriptions. Not applicable to add-on features or non-renewing access fees or services. Expires 10/31/26. Care.com does not employ or place any caregiver. Background checks are an important start, but they have limits. Visit www.care.com/safety.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Misty Copeland grew up sleeping on a motel floor with five siblings, unsure where the next meal was coming from. At 13, she walked into her first ballet class and felt something she'd never felt before: safe. Dr. Becky talks with the first Black woman to become a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre about the years she was asked to paint her skin to match the rest of the corps, the mentors who taught her to advocate for herself, and what confidence looks like once you stop having to prove it. Plus: how she's raising her own son with the stability she spent her childhood without, and why she still wants him to struggle a little.

Misty Copeland has written a new book for middle grade readers called “Firebird Waltz” - the first in a new series called Star Fire Academy.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Skylight: Get $30 off a 15-inch Skylight Calendar at myskylight.com/becky
• SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today
• Frida: Shop Frida at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today
• Oso & Me: Use the code OSOGOOD15 for 15% off clothes newborn through age ten

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We all know too much screen time isn’t good for kids—and our instinct as parents is to protect them from it. But when fear shapes how we manage screens at home, it can quickly turn into shame the moment they pick one up.

In today’s world, where screens are woven into so much of daily life, the real challenge is to face that reality with thoughtfulness – and to make choices guided by our values, not by guilt. In this favorite episode from the archive, Dr. Becky sits down with screen time expert Ash Brandon, EdS (@thegamereducator) to talk about the moral judgments, practical boundaries, and family-specific choices that shape our approach to screens.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

*Offer applies to initial term of Care.com membership subscriptions. Not applicable to add-on features or non-renewing access fees or services. Expires 10/31/26. Care.com does not employ or place any caregiver. Background checks are an important start, but they have limits. Visit www.care.com/safety.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Twelve weeks of parental leave. Then you're back at your desk, wondering why it feels so hard.

Today we’re posting an episode from Rattled, our podcast for parents of newborns and babies, because it’s about something everybody experiences. It’s the final part of our three-part series with Care.com on finding care for your baby, and it's about a transition nobody preps you for: going back to work.

Dr. Becky sits down with Lauren Smith Brody, journalist and author of The Fifth Trimester, who's interviewed hundreds of working moms about this exact moment (and lived it herself). Lauren calls her own first day back "the second cutting of the cord." She's got names for feelings you didn't know had names: benevolent discrimination, gatekeeping, the 0.5x version of yourself who has to show up the second you walk through your front door.

They also get practical: how to turn decisions into systems before decision fatigue wrecks your evening, what a "ramp up" program actually looks like, and why mom guilt is, in Lauren's words, "a sexist, classist social construct" you can solve for like a math problem.

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Care.com. Find background-checked nannies, sitters, and daycares at Care.com, and use code BECKY35 for 35% off your membership.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

*Offer applies to initial term of Care.com membership subscriptions. Not applicable to add-on features or non-renewing access fees or services. Expires 10/31/26. Care.com does not employ or place any caregiver. Background checks are an important start, but they have limits. Visit www.care.com/safety.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you’ve yelled at your kid, you’re not a bad parent. You’re a good parent with an overwhelmed nervous system. In today’s revisit from the Good Inside archives, Dr. Becky breaks down the science behind yelling, snapping, and shutting down. She explains why our bodies react before our brains can catch up – and how understanding this will help you pause, reset, and reconnect.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

*Offer applies to initial term of Care.com membership subscriptions. Not applicable to add-on features or non-renewing access fees or services. Expires 10/31/26. Care.com does not employ or place any caregiver. Background checks are an important start, but they have limits. Visit www.care.com/safety.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your kid hits. Melts down the second you leave the house. Argues about everything, all day, every single day. You've tried the time-outs, the consequences, the calm-down corner. Nothing works. Why are we always at that cliff?

Dr. Becky spent two hours in a Reddit thread literally called "Nothing Works" and pulled three real posts to build this episode. Her answer: you're intervening at the cliff, when the real leverage is on the road that led there. She walks through the exact minute-by-minute buildup (the snack request, the "just one more minute," the phone glance) where a parent could've exited before the blowup, plus scripts you can actually use.

Back to school brings big changes - new routines, new teachers, new challenges. Our new Back To School program helps you prepare for day one, navigate tricky moments, and build your kid's resilience.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 depression list. He had no idea.

In this episode, Dr. Becky and Dr. Choukalas go through the symptom list live — and talk about why this form of depression is so easy to miss, what it costs the whole family when it goes unnamed, and what getting help actually looked like for one father who needed it badly.

Christopher G. Choukalas, MD, MS is the author of Even the Darkest Night: A Father's Journey of Hope and Healing from Paternal Depression.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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, Strangers, Belle traces how she got to this place - and how she found her way back.

They get into the stuff we all carry: why "being good" can quietly cost you yourself, how kids notice far more than we give them credit for, and why it's never too late to tell them the truth.

Dr. Becky wrote up her thoughts on how to get the "good girl" tendency out of your own emotional driver seat.

*

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 why the answer is no.

They get into attachment and why the messy, inconvenient, friction-filled version of connection is the version that actually wires a child's brain. Why a frictionless AI that always agrees with you might be the real risk. A rubric (DETECT) for judging any piece of kid-facing tech before it comes in the house. And the idea Dana calls the most freeing thing she learned writing her new book: good-enough parenting isn't a nice thing to say, it's a biological necessity.

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.