Please welcome to the stage Dr. Becky Kennedy, founder and CEO, Good Inside, and interviewer Moira Forbes, Executive Vice President, Forbes.
I am very excited for this conversation with Dr. Becky because we've been hearing from and meeting so many extraordinary leaders today. But I think as we saw with those amazing young women and I think a question that all parents grapple with is how do we create or help raise resilient, kind, compassionate children to help really shape the future that we all want to see. Dr. Becky is someone who is reshaping those conversations herself and today we're going to talk about how to build the skills to ensure that our children can not just thrive but also have opportunities to really reshape what leadership looks like in the future. So thank you Dr. Becky, I want to start off because one of the things I think that's so seminal to your work that I thought was really interesting is you say parents don't need to be perfect. They don't need to keep trying. They need to be sturdy. Can you walk us through what that means and what it looks like in practice?
Yeah. So sturdiness to me, being sturdy is always the word I come to because I really like words that bring a visceral feeling. Like if you think about someone in your life who's sturdy, you probably have a sense of what it feels like to be around them. What does it mean to be a sturdy leader? And I think in parenting, similarly to leadership, we've had two extremes. In parenting, a lot of us were raised with we don't care about your feelings. I'm in charge. You should just be compliant. And that was one extreme. And then something's happened where we moved to the other extreme where not only do we care about our kids' feelings, but now it's like our kids' feelings get to dictate our decisions. I would say both extremes are equally bad for kids. Sturdiness to me is our ability as a leader to set boundaries, which means limits or make decisions we know are good for someone in the long term. Setting a boundary on one end and on the other end at the same time validate and connect to someone else's experience. Being able to do those two things at the same time is what it means to be sturdy. So, as a parent, it might mean saying there's no more TV. It is bedtime. That's a boundary. And guess what my kid's going to do when I set that boundary? My kid has never said to me, "You're right. I should go to bed. Thank you for that good decision." Never. Okay. When you set a boundary, a kid whines, they protest, they have a tantrum because they're upset. But that allows me to do the second part of my job as a sturdy leader. I can say to them, "Oh, you wish you could watch another show." I get it. That makes sense. It's hard to end for me, too. But as I'm validating their feelings, I'm continuing to hold a boundary. And so boundary and validation together, that's really what it means to be a sturdy leader.
We have talked a lot today about in these conversations in the past around the dynamic young girls face and the confidence gap that starts to happen as they reach adolescence. But also something that we haven't really talked about as much which I think is so important in terms of how we think about leadership and how we think about our children in the future is boys and the opportunity for them to really embrace and understand vulnerability and emotion. Can you walk through the differences that you see and the ways in which parents should be responding and approaching those different dynamics?
Absolutely. It's such a great question. You know, one of the things I see in young girls and I still think we see in female leaders, and you can tell me if this kind of resonates by your reaction, is a lot of us adult women still have this tendency to take on other people's feelings as our fault or our responsibility, which is actually not empathy at all. Empathy is caring about people's feelings. But that's very different than taking responsibility for people's feelings. At the same time, a lot of young boys I see have the opposite problem. If young girls are almost taught to take care of everyone else's feelings for them, I see so many examples where young boys are almost projecting their own feelings as someone else's fault. Here's a good example. Youth basketball. I'm at this youth basketball center. There's girls games. There's boy games. And I swear it was only after certain boy games that I'd hear this from young boys. We lost. It was the ref's fault. The ref made a bad call. Or if my teammate only passed the ball to me, I would have made the shot and we would have won. I actually think what's happening is profound. That boy is feeling disappointed. That's all that's happening. They're disappointed. They lost the game. And instead of learning that disappointment lives in my body, it's no one's fault. Nobody did that disappointment to me. Instead, it's almost like I'm struggling to feel disappointed. And I've learned and men are almost socialized to say, "Who did this feeling to me? Whose fault is this?" And as long as we continue to raise boys to externalize blame for their feelings and raise women to take on fault for other people's feelings, that's a really bad match. And so, while we teach girls how to set boundaries, see other people's feelings as real, but not take them in, we actually have to also teach boys your feelings are your own. And I can actually help you feel empowered enough to tolerate them, not blame people for them.
And I think that's such an interesting nuance and in how we think and I saw a lot of people's heads going up and down in terms of it mirroring the types of experience many of us have. Another core aspect of your work is self-worth and this concept that we're living in a world where there's so much external validation literally in real time and not just for young kids but for adults as well. How do you think about building models and systems for your children around self-worth and sturdiness in a way that better prepares them to really develop and harness that self value earlier in life?
Yeah. So, I think we have to really understand what confidence is to figure out how to build it, right? And to me, confidence isn't feeling good about yourself. I think that's actually a really dangerous version of confidence we're told a lot. To me, confidence is self-trust. It's a very big difference. It's self-trust. It's trusting the signals in your body. It's trusting your feelings. It's trusting that you can gaze in and understand what's going on for yourself. and almost believe yourself. I was uncomfortable in that meeting. That comment did feel inappropriate. My body is giving me a signal rather than well would my five friends have found that inappropriate and no one else reacted so maybe it's not such a big deal. Such a good example of whether my signals give me data or I have learned instead to rely on everyone else around me to tell me what I feel. Now, what's scary to me about raising kids these days, especially in the age of social media, is think about what so much of social media is, and it's especially true, I think, for young girls. Let me show you who I am, and you'll tell me if I'm good enough. Let me show you who I am, and based on your reaction, I'll know, am I worthy? Am I cool? Is this a good photo? Am I liked? It's a complete outside in way of trying to build your self-worth, which we all know the gig is up at some point. It's a really fragile and dangerous way to build self-worth. I think there's never been a more important time to help young kids, girls and boys, definitely girls, learn to gaze in given how much external validation there is in the world. Even as simple as day-to-day interactions, right? Instead of focusing so much on grades or comments people make about them, you're so smart. Focusing on, hey, I see you wrote this paper about this topic. How did you think of that? How did you think to start your essay that way? What I'm really saying to a kid is your worth and value is inside you. I want to hear your story, not people's evaluation of you. Even if a girl says, "Do you think I look pretty in this outfit?" One of my favorite lines, you know, sweetie, how you feel in an outfit is so much more important than how it looks to others. What do you like about it? Do you feel good? How did you pick it out? I'm more interested in what lives inside my daughter than how she appears to others and how they evaluate her.
