The single most important parenting strategy | Becky Kennedy

0:09Hey, TED listeners, it's your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider. Imagine a world where every parenting hiccup could be turned into an opportunity for growth, where even your worst moments of madness could become stepping stones toward a stronger and more connected relationship with your child. Well, in today's TED 2023 talk, psychologist and parenting expert Becky Kennedy unveils the magic of something called repair. It's not about being a perfect parent. It's about becoming a skilled repairer. I recently had the chance to talk to someone who's helped millions of parents contend with their challenges.

0:49After the talk, stick around for my conversation with Brown economics professor and parenting books author, Emily Oster, where we tackle how to use evidence and data in everyday parenting decisions.

1:10So it's Sunday night. I'm in my kitchen. I just finished cooking dinner for my family, and I am on edge. I mean, I'm exhausted. I haven't been sleeping well. I'm anxious about the upcoming work week. I'm overwhelmed by all the items on my unfinished to-do list. And then my son walks into the kitchen. He looks at the table and whines, he screams, chicken again? Disgusting. And that's it. I snap. I look at him and I yell, what is wrong with you? Can you be grateful for one thing in your life? And things get worse from there. He screams, I hate you. He runs out of the room and he slams his bedroom door.

1:53And now my self-loathing session begins as I say to myself, what is wrong with me? I've messed up my kid forever. Well, if you're a parent, you've probably felt that pain. For me, it comes with an extra layer of shame. I mean, I'm a clinical psychologist, and my specialty is helping people become better parents. And yet, this is true as well. There is no such thing as a perfect parent. Mistakes and struggles, they come with the job, but no one tells us what to do next. Do we just move on, kind of just pretend the whole thing never happened? Or if I say something, what are the words? Well, for years, as a clinical psychologist in private practice, I saw client after client struggle with this question.

2:49And now, as the creator of the parenting content and community platform Good Inside, I see millions of parents around the globe struggle with this issue. All parents yell. No one knows what to do next. Well, I'm determined to fill this gap. After all, there's almost nothing within our interpersonal relationships that can have as much impact as repair. Whenever a parent asks me, what one parenting strategy should I focus on? I always say the same thing, get good at repair. So what is repair? Repair is the act of going back to a moment of disconnection, taking responsibility for your behavior and acknowledging the impact it had on another.

3:42And I want to differentiate a repair from an apology, because when an apology often looks to shut a conversation down, hey, I'm sorry I yelled, can we move on now? a good repair opens one up. And if you think about what it means to get good at repair, there's so much baked in realism and hope and possibility. Repair assumes there's been a rupture. So to repair, you have to mess up or fall short of someone else's expectations, which means the next time I snap at my kid or my husband or my work colleague, instead of berating myself like I did that night in the kitchen, I try to remind myself I'm focusing on getting good at repair.

4:34Step one is rupture. Check that off. I crushed it. step two is repair i can do this i'm actually right on track so let's get back to my example i'm in the kitchen my son is in his room well what will happen if i don't repair that's really important to understand and helps us make a decision about what to do next Well, here are the facts. My son is alone, overwhelmed, and in a state of distress because let's face it, his mom just became scary mom. And now he has to figure out a way to get back to feeling safe and secure. And if I don't go help him do that through making a repair, he has to rely on one of the only coping mechanisms he has at his own disposal, self-blame.

5:32Self-blame sounds like this. Something's wrong with me. I'm unlovable. I make bad things happen. Ronald Fairburn may have said it best when he wrote that for kids, it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil. In other words, it's actually adaptive for a child to internalize badness and fault, because at least then they can hold on to the idea that their parents and the world around them is safe and good. And while self-blame works for us in childhood, we all know it works against us in adulthood. Something's wrong with me. I make bad things happen.

6:23I'm unlovable. These are the core fears of so many adults. But really, we see here, they are actually the childhood stories we wrote when we were left alone following distressing events that went unrepaired. Plus, adults with self-blame are vulnerable to depression, anxiety, deep feelings of worthlessness, none of which we want for our kids. And we can do better. And it doesn't mean we have to be perfect. When you repair, you go further than removing a child's story of self-blame. You get to add in all the elements that were missing in the first place. Safety, connection, coherence, love, goodness.

7:11It's as if you're saying to a child, I will not let this chapter of your life end in self-blame. Yes, this chapter will still contain the event of yelling, but I can ensure this chapter has a different ending and therefore a different title and theme and lesson learned. We know that memory is original events combined with every other time you've remembered that event. This is why therapy is helpful, right? When you remember painful experiences from your past within a safer and more connected relationship, The event remains, but your story of the event, it changes. And then you change. With repair, we effectively change the past.

8:05So let's write a better story. Let's learn how to repair. Step one, repair with yourself. That's right. I mean, you can't offer compassion or groundedness or understanding to someone else. before you access those qualities within yourself. Self-repair means separating your identity, who you are, from your behavior, what you did. For me, it means telling myself two things are true. I'm not proud of my latest behavior, and my latest behavior doesn't define me. Even as I struggle on the outside, I remain good inside. I can then start to see that I'm a good parent, identity, who was having a hard time, behavior, and no, this doesn't let me off the hook.

9:01This is precisely what leaves me on the hook for change. Because now that I've replaced my spiral with groundedness, I can actually use my energy toward thinking about what I want to do differently the next time. Oh, and I can now use my energy to go repair with my son. Step two, repair with your child. There's no exact formula. I often think about three elements. Name what happened, take responsibility, state what you would do differently the next time. It could come together like this. Hey, I keep thinking about what happened the other night in the kitchen. I'm sorry I yelled. I'm sure that felt scary, and it wasn't your fault.

9:42I'm working on staying calm even when I'm frustrated. A 15-second intervention can have a lifelong impact. I've replaced my child's story of self-blame with a story of self-trust and safety and connection. I mean, what a massive upgrade. And to give a little more clarity around how to repair, I want to share a few examples of what I call not repair, which are things that come more naturally to most of us, definitely me included. hey, I'm sorry I yelled at you in the kitchen, but, you know, if you wouldn't have complained about dinner, it wouldn't have happened. You know, you really need to be grateful for things in your life, like a home-cooked meal.

10:22Then you won't get yelled at. Not only do these interventions fail at the goal of reconnection, they also insinuate that your child caused your reaction, which simply isn't true and isn't a model of emotion regulation we want to pass on to the next generation.

10:44So let's say we've all resisted the, it was your fault anyway, not repairs, and have instead prioritized a repair that allows us to reconnect. What might the impact be? What might that look like in adulthood? My adult child won't spiral in self-blame when they make a mistake and won't take on blame for someone else's mistake. My adult child will know how to take responsibility for their behavior because you've modeled how to take responsibility for yours. Repairing with a child today sets the stage for these critical adult relationship patterns. Plus, it gets better. Now that I've reconnected with my son, I can do something really impactful.

11:31I can teach him a skill he didn't have in the first place, which is how kids actually change their behavior. So maybe the next day I say, you know, you're not always going to like what I make for dinner. Instead of saying, that's disgusting, I wonder if you could say, not my favorite. Now I'm teaching him how to regulate his understandable disappointment and communicate effectively and respectfully with another person. That never would have happened if instead I had been blaming him for my reaction. So here's the point where you might have a lingering concern. Maybe you're thinking, you know, I have a feeling my kid's older than your kid.

12:12I think it's too late. Or I've done a lot worse than you did in the kitchen. Maybe it's too late. Well, I mean this. If you have only one takeaway from this talk, please let this be it. It is not too late. It is never too late. How do I know? Well, imagine right after this, you get a call from one of your parents. And if neither of your parents are alive, imagine finding and opening a letter you hadn't seen until that moment. Okay, walk through this with me. Here's the call. Hey, I know this sounds out of the blue, but I've been thinking a lot about your childhood. And I think there were a lot of moments that felt really bad to you.

13:01And you were right to feel that way. Those moments weren't your fault. They were times when I was struggling, and if I could have gone back, I would have stepped aside. I would have calmed myself down and then found you to help you with whatever you were struggling with. I'm sorry. And if you're ever willing to talk to me about any of those moments, I'll listen. I won't listen to have a rebuttal. I'll listen to understand. I love you. I don't know many adults who don't have a fairly visceral reaction to that exercise. I often hear, why am I crying? Or, listen, that wouldn't change everything, but it might change some things.

13:47Well, I definitely do not special in math, but here's something I know with certainty. If you have a child, that child is younger than you are. Always true. The story of their life is shorter and even more amenable to editing. So if that imagined exercise had an impact on you, imagine the impact an actual repair will have on your child. See, I told you, it's never too late. Thank you.

14:41Hey listeners, it's Dr. Shoshana. To go deeper on all the challenges that parents face, I reached out to Emily Oster. Emily is an economics professor at Brown University and a writer of books on pregnancy and parenting. She writes the hugely popular Substack newsletter, Parent Data, and hosts a podcast of the same name. Throughout, she blends the insights and analytical tools of economics and social science to cut through the fog and ease the fears, concerns, and worries of parents who are awash in data, but who can't always make sense of it.

15:21So I was an economist first. I was trained at Harvard. My PhD is in economics. My academic work is about health and statistical methods. And so I really was working in a very traditional kind of economics professor role, then I got pregnant. And my work in economics is very data focused, focused on understanding what questions we can answer with data, what we can't. And when I got pregnant, I really found myself using the tools from my job in the service of my pregnancy. And ultimately that experience and the experience of doing the same when my kids were born led to the books, which are some combination of memoir and meta-analysis and really try to take these tools of data and analytics and bring them to this very personal space.

16:19So when it comes to parenting, how do you strike a balance between hard data and evidence and intuition or gut feelings? In almost every parenting decision, those are both going to be really important. And the reason for that is that data is not bossy. So when we look at data on parenting, it's going to tell you facts. Like, if you make this choice, here are some things you might expect to happen. If you make this choice, here are some risks and benefits of that. And there are numbers, there's data, there's evidence there, but it's very, very rare in any of these spaces that that's going to be the answer.

17:03You know, you can ask about something in pregnancy like the epidural. You ask, what are the benefits of that? What are the possible downsides? You can look at all those pieces of data, but that's not going to tell you you should do it or you should not do it. It's going to tell you, here's a place to start. And then you combine your preferences with that and your gut instinct or however you want to describe that feeling of there's something that really seems right to me. And that's what you lay on top of the data. But you need both of those pieces because there's just not a lot of places where you have to do one thing or have to do another thing.

17:40So building on that, have you found any, say, limits to a data-driven approach to parenting? Are there issues maybe where the data doesn't help or doesn't help enough? No, data is perfect. Why are you? Next question. No, I'm kidding. There are many places where I wish the data were better. I mean, that's almost every place. And there are some places where the data is so poor that I think it's almost no better than what you would have thought carefully about it beforehand. And some of those situations, the answer is, well, it doesn't really matter because this isn't very important. And there are other places, you know, particularly as my kids get older, where it is more frustrating to not have evidence.

18:30So a good example is screen time. I think our evidence on the costs and benefits of screen time and the right balance and how we think about things like social media, the evidence there is not what we'd like. It's not as helpful as we need. And that's really frustrating because it feels so fraught. And it feels like a place where, yeah, I have preferences and I have instincts, but I really like to start with the data. That feels really important and it's just missing. So in this age of fake news and really overwhelming information on the Internet, do you have any tips for parents on how to evaluate information for themselves to make sure that the data is credible?

19:15So the first thing I tell people, I actually write a lot about like, what do we mean by data literacy? Because one of the goals that I have is to try to build people's data literacy. And that's a little different than saying I want to give everyone a PhD in economics, even though that would be great. But people are busy. They have other passions. But there are some parts of data literacy I think we could have more broadly out there in the world. And let me just talk about sort of two. One is I will often urge people to think about where the data comes from. So when you hear a fact, it's often framed as if it's kind of dropped down on high, but all data comes from somewhere.

19:57It comes from surveys or it comes from measuring people's something in a hospital, something in a doctor's office. It comes from somewhere. And thinking about where is the source of that data and how much of it is there and how representative is that group of you or of the people who are trying to make decisions about, that's really important. So spending a little time just understanding where is this coming from. And then spending a little bit of time often thinking about what else do we know about a problem? So when you see headlines about data, when you see discussions about a new study, it will frequently feel like every new study replaces all evidence that comes before.

20:40And that's just not true. So just taking a step back and thinking, what do we know before? What's really added by this new study? And where is this evidence coming from? That's sort of a first critical step that I think everybody should be able to do. Those are such great tips. Now, have you ever been trapped in a situation of what we'll call analysis paralysis from too much data? Tell me about that situation, if you've had one, and how you navigated out of it. So one secret weapon is my husband is also an economist. Oh, my gosh. Which is like, okay, put it aside. Put aside your feelings about that.

21:21But it means that we speak a very similar language. And I think one of the things that can drag you into that kind of analysis paralysis or just down the rabbit hole of like too many pieces of data and just constantly look over there, look over there, like being alone in your decision making is at risk for that. And I think partly like one of the two of us, if we're doing that, one person would be like, let's take a step back. Like, let's let's try not to miss the forest for the trees. But I also think in many of those situations, the problem that people have is they haven't actually thought about what the question that they're asking is.

21:57So they've thought about the topic. So they've thought about the topic of like screen time or school quality or potty training. But they haven't actually asked a question. They've just been like potty training. It seems hard. Let me go find out about that. But what are you trying to achieve with that? What's your question? What are your two options? And then you will go to the data with a much more structured idea of what you're looking for. I will say for me, potty training is probably the place where I just like went in the rabbit hole and just couldn't get out, like trying to figure out how to address the my child won't poop in the potty problem that so many of us have.

22:37And I had for many, many, many years and we tried absolutely. I'm not going to tell you which of my kids it was, but let me just say I tried everything. And one of my children would not poop in the potty for like an additional year after they were otherwise fully potty trained. And despite all of my efforts and reading every single paper, I never solved the problem. And then we spent a week with my mother and she fixed it in one day. Wow. There you go. I hear you. So building on that, given that both you and your husband are economists, do you together have like a specific framework or a method for making decisions based on data and intuition?

23:23So I call it the four Fs. You start by framing the question. That's the first F, figuring out what you're actually asking. What are your two options? There's then a fact-finding step. And that's a place to look for data before you've made a decision. and rather than what I think many of us do, which is like we get like a piece of information and then we make a decision, but then we get some more information, we change our decision to really separate those out. First, you get all the data you need, all the information you get it, like dump it into a document or a sheet or in your head or whatever.

23:57And then in step three, the final decision, you actually make the decision. So you actually sit down and you say, okay, we have all the information we need. We know the question. Let's make this decision and then let's move on. Let's not constantly dwell on this decision. We made a decision. We're going to move forward. And then I tell people there should be a fourth F, which is follow-up, that almost all our decisions deserve a follow-up later. Was that the right decision? Should we have done something differently? But that that follow-up shouldn't be like the next day. It should be at some sort of specific time that you plan in the future.

24:30So just putting a bit of structure around some of these big decisions, you have to do that for like, what do we have for dinner? You know, your life would be exhausting. But when you have bigger decisions, where should my kid go to school? What should we have them do for the summer? It's really useful to put some structure around what information you're looking for. I love that systematic framework. That's fantastic. So how do you handle situations when the data contradicts widely accepted parenting beliefs or practices? Well, usually I go with the data. I mean, I actually don't find that piece very complicated at all.

25:11I mean, there's plenty of places where there's like an old wives tale that will tell you one thing and then the data tells you something else. I'm always going to go with the data. It's harder when what happens is the data contradicts what you feel is right for your family. And again, I don't think that's as common as you might fear because it's so rare that the data says there's only one right choice. There are places where you say, hey, the data kind of points in one direction, but my preferences are really strong in the other direction. And I think that's good. That's a good way to structure it and to recognize, you know, we're going to do this thing that works for my family, even though maybe other people would be more likely to choose something else.

26:00Emily, with the ever evolving nature of data and the ability to share it, how do you ensure that your recommendations really stay relevant and timely for modern parents? Revising? I mean, so my first book, Expecting Better, which is about pregnancy, is now, it was first published a decade ago. And I spent like last week doing revisions for what will be, I think, our fifth pretty substantial revision. And so, you know, the reality is that less changes than you would think. New data comes out, but there are on many of these topics, we already had a lot of data. And it's not that common that like some new thing would come out that would be so important that it would change everything.

26:45But there have been cases in which the landscape changes, the technology changes. You know, a decade ago, prenatal testing looked really different than it does now. And that's a part of Expecting Better that's been updated a bunch of times because, you know, nobody's doing the prenatal testing the way I did in what felt like 1875, but I guess was only like 2012. Yeah. And so going back, like anything in science and revising it based on your information is so important. And it's something I so wish that the general public understood is actually part of the scientific method. As evidence improves, we have to be willing to rewrite and to say the thing that I wrote before was the best information based on what we knew before.

27:31And now here's the best information we have now. And here's where there's remaining uncertainty. Yeah. Now, I realize this next question is a big topic, but I think it's important to touch on. And that is, how do you view the impact of socioeconomic factors on parenting choices and outcomes? So when I talk about socioeconomic status factors, it's almost always in the context of trying to understand why it's so hard to answer many of the questions that we have. If you look at something like breastfeeding, it's really hard to use observational data to study breastfeeding because the differences across moms who breastfeed and moms who don't, they tend to have really different socioeconomic status metrics.

28:17So in that frame is about socioeconomic status as a confound, but I think it also illustrates this broader issue, which is that there are enormous differences in the resources available to people. And those differences in resources drive differences in outcomes. But the differences in resources are so vast, it's very difficult to say. it's this one thing. If only we could do this one thing to change things, it's such a broad problem. And so thinking about how we can support families in childcare, in parental leave, in all of these dimensions are in some ways like equally important. And all of those things together are contributing to a circumstance in which we do not have a quality of opportunity, that the circumstances that you're born into are having really important impacts on your outcomes.

29:11which is not, I think, the society most of us would like to be in. Very true. Yes. What was the most surprising piece of data or information that you came across when writing your books? If there's just one. I mean, there are many surprising things. I think the one I will pull out is very early, which is about bed rest. So it turns out there are basically no pregnancy complications for which bed rest is a good idea. And bed rest is still pretty commonly prescribed, less so than it was a decade ago or 20 years ago, but it's still pretty commonly prescribed. And there's just really nothing for which we think that it works.

29:56That data is just not there. Yeah, it's so interesting. It's one of the reasons I did not go into OBGYN as a field because I found that there were so many practices being employed that had no data behind them. And I feel like, you know, that's not, that's not the right way to practice medicine. But it's, I mean, it's hard. It's interesting since I've written expecting better, I've spent many more hours talking to obstetricians and doctors about this stuff. And one of the things that we sometimes talk about is they'll tell me like, my patients want some help. They want to be told to do something.

30:30And, you know, these are people who would agree that bed rest is not a good idea. So that's not what they're prescribing, but they said, you know, So I understand the instinct, which is like you're in preterm labor. You want to be told something that will work. You don't want to be told like, well, just hope that it doesn't progress. That's a terrible thing to be told. So some of these things, I think, get reinforced because almost there's a sense in which it's not exactly the patient wants it, but it's that there's a social pressure to do something. Mm-hmm. Yep. Okay. Is there any message or insight?

31:04there's probably many of them, that you would want to share with parents who are navigating their own complexities and challenges of raising kids in today's world? I will say two things. So first, I think there's so much emphasis on trying to get it right, as if that is a thing that one could do that would control all outcomes or even that that would exist. And to just let go of the idea that there's a right. There can be a right for you, but there's no right. And so trying to get to the right for you on all of these choices, that's where you should be trying to head rather than trying to get to the right for everybody.

31:45And the second thing I will say is that people need a lot more sleep than you think. And that's true of little kids, although they tend to just take the sleep when they need it. It's also true of older kids who will fight you on the sleep, but they really need a lot more sleep than you think. And it's also true of you. So I think families are deprioritizing sleep and should prioritize it more.

32:14That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farah Degrunge, David Biello, Daniela Balareso, and Michelle Quint. I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. I'll talk to you again next week.