The Trouble with Dr. Becky’s “Good Inside” Paradigm

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Disclaimer: I am not a parenting expert. I am a moral philosopher who’s a parent. And it’s from that perspective that I find Dr. Becky’s wildly popular “Good Inside” framework for parenting troubling. And lacking.

My long-held inchoate worries were brought into focus by this terrific conversation between my friends Melinda Wenner Moyer and Anne Helen Petersen, for Petersen’s Culture Study podcast. Wenner Moyer is the author of two books: How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes and Hello, Cruel World! Science-Based Strategies for Raising Terrific Kids in Terrifying Times. Both are excellent books, firmly rooted in data and offering a humane vision of parenting that is also refreshingly pragmatic. And what I find particularly refreshing about Wenner Moyer’s approach is that it is alive to a range of moral possibilities for our children—without overburdening parents with minutely controlling how their children turn out, or being a perfectionist in the process.

It also helped me, in conjunction with the aforementioned conversation about intensive parenting, to crystallize what I find so vexing about the “gentle parenting” mantras epitomized by the parenting advice of Dr. Becky. (Although she, to be fair, isn’t sold on that label.)