A review by sadietay
Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Becky Kennedy

4.0

I love Dr. Becky’s approachable, centered, and loving work in the world of parenting!!! She has such an important voice. We’ve implemented many of her practices into our home and have become better because of it; things like consent circuit, mantras, and staying with a child during a consequence (for lack of a better word).

Much of the boom felt repetitive. It gave me the feeling that it had to be in order to reach the standard size of a book people will purchase, rather than being a podcast or a series of essays.

Dr. Becky received a PhD in child psychology from the prestigious Columbia University; yet makes her wealth of knowledge so approachable and basic. The only downside of this was the lack of foundation for me in understanding what data and research this was built on (because I’m certain her work must be academically honorable). Also without this foundation of where her ideas come from there was an overall feeling that she came up with all of it!

“Joining a revolutionary way of parenting” and “being the parenting cycle breaker” where major themes, which while true for many parents is also not the case for all. Many of her ideas rang true with century old practices of Charlotte Mason seeing kids as “born persons” who need to explore the world with close attachment to their parent figures. There are likely many communities around the world who practice similar attachment- and whole-child parenting that were not given a nod.

In future work or her next book I would love to hear more from Dr. Becky about engaging children in imperfect communities and good citizens. Now that she have a basic understanding of navigating the parent-child relationship, how to do stretch into our local and global communities? I feel like her viewpoints in this book could build a lot of this topic and I would love to hear it!