Every parent asks their kid some version of the same question: “Who's your best friend?” Adam Grant thinks that's the wrong thing to be asking, at any age.

His new book Vibe breaks friendship into four types: pals, allies, companions, and associates. Most of us assume we need one person who's all four. Grant's research says that's a setup for disappointment, and that kids who are genuinely well-liked at school still feel excluded and isolated if they don't have one "bestie."

Dr. Becky and Adam get into why it takes about 50 hours, on average, to make a friend (and up to 200 to make a close one), why a scary hike or a rough IKEA build can bond people faster than anything easy, and why the person who reacts the biggest in your house usually ends up running it.

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We spend too much time making sure our boys know the right answer, and not enough time helping them build the emotional skills to act on it when the stakes are high.

“Should you respect someone’s no?” Yes.
“Should you speak up when something bad is happening?” Yes.

Our kids can ace that test.

Now add rejection. Add wanting to belong. Add: “If I say something, my friends might turn on me.”

Knowing the right answer isn’t the same as being able to act on it when the moment gets hard.

In this episode, a special recording of a live event with the Good Inside community in response to recent headlines about sexual assault, Dr. Becky shares three emotional skills we can start building in our boys today. These aren’t everything - sexual violence is not an individual parenting problem, and it won’t have an individual parenting solution. But these aren't nothing, either. They're some things we can do now, long before the stakes get higher.

Read Dr. Becky’s notes on this episode on the Good Inside blog.

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Melinda French Gates has run some of the most powerful rooms in the world. She co-founded and co-chaired the Gates Foundation. She's sat across from heads of state. And in her 40s, at the top of her career, she started doubting herself in meetings she'd run a hundred times before.

She talks to Dr. Becky about why: chronic insomnia; undiagnosed perimenopause; a body that had learned, years earlier, to override its own signals, first in a male-dominated work culture, then in a college relationship that taught her not to trust her own read on things.

They get into a Gallup survey Melinda’s organization Pivotal Ventures ran this year of 5,000 adults, where half the respondents who'd been pregnant said they struggled with their mental health during or after it. And they talk about what Melinda calls the "10,000 paper cuts": the small, repeated moments, a comment talked over in a meeting, a doctor who doesn't quite listen, that teach women to stop trusting their own gut long before anyone tells them to, directly, all at once.

Becky and Melinda work out what actually rebuilds that trust, in doctors' offices and living rooms alike. Plus: what Melinda's granddaughters are teaching her about the phrase "I'm not ready yet," and the running joke she and her own kids share that perfect is creepy.

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Thanks to Carter’s, Good Inside’s new Confidence Program is free for every family for the next six months. Click here to learn more.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Frida: Shop Frida at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today
• Perelel: Use code GOODINSIDE for 20% off your first order at perelelhealth.com/GOODINSIDE
• Yoto: Get 15% off your order with the code DRBECKY15 at YotoPlay.com. New customers only, ends October 31, offer valid on select products only. Terms apply.
• 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 http://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.

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Two parents came to Dr. Becky on the same day, both worried about their kid's confidence. One had a kid who wouldn't join the group. The other had a teenager who wouldn't leave the group. Dr. Becky says: maybe confidence isn’t what we think it is. She breaks down what confidence actually means, then she names three things well-meaning parents do that quietly work against building that kind of confidence.

Thanks to Carter’s, Good Inside’s new Confidence Program is free for every family for the next six months. Click here to learn more.

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Was today a good day? Did my kid seem happy? If the answer is no, even a little, it can feel like the whole day failed, like you failed.

Dr. Becky sits down with Kate Bowler, a professor at Duke University, to make the case that happiness might be the wrong thing to optimize for in the first place. Happiness, Kate argues, is really just ease: a hundred small circumstances lining up so nothing feels hard. Which means chasing it for your kids can quietly turn you into what Kate calls a professional happiness manager, smoothing every rough edge before it reaches them.

Joy is different. It doesn't need conditions to line up. It shows up in weird obsessions, a dumb dance in the kitchen, a dry pasta fight, a moment at the worst point in Kate's own life (she spent years navigating a serious cancer diagnosis) when something good found her anyway. Kate and Becky talk through what kids already understand about joy that adults forget, why so many moms don't believe joy is even available to them, and a practical exercise Kate uses to name the resentments that quietly block it.

Read A Blessing for Parents Who Are Trying, adapted from Kate Bowler’s latest book, Joyful, Anyway.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Skylight: Get $30 off a 15-inch Skylight Calendar at myskylight.com/becky
• Girl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn more
• Yoto: Get 15% off your order with the code DRBECKY15 at YotoPlay.com. New customers only, ends October 31, offer valid on select products only. Terms apply.
• 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.

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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?"

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today
• Frida: Shop Frida at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today
• Pampers Easy Ups: Start your potty training journey with Peppa Pig Pampers Easy Ups
• 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.