Rattled: When New Parenthood Shakes You

Twelve weeks of parental leave. Then you're back at your desk, wondering why it feels so hard. Today we’re posting an episode from Rattled, our podcast for parents of newborns and babies, because it’s about something everybody experiences. It’s the final part of our three-part series with Care.com on finding care for your baby, and it's about a transition nobody preps you for: going back to work. Dr. Becky sits down with Lauren Smith Brody, journalist and author of The Fifth Trimester, who's interviewed hundreds of working moms about this exact moment (and lived it herself). Lauren calls her own first day back "the second cutting of the cord." She's got names for feelings you didn't know had names: benevolent discrimination, gatekeeping, the 0.5x version of yourself who has to show up the second you walk through your front door. They also get practical: how to turn decisions into systems before decision fatigue wrecks your evening, what a "ramp up" program actually looks like, and why mom guilt is, in Lauren's words, "a sexist, classist social construct" you can solve for like a math problem. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Care.com. Find background-checked nannies, sitters, and daycares at Care.com, and use code BECKY35 for 35% off your membership. * Thank you to Care.com for making this episode possible. 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. Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

"You don't have what it takes." That's the sentence that ran through Dr. Becky's head the night her baby threw up an entire bottle on her, minutes before she was due out the door. It's not a sentence parenting experts are “supposed to” have. Dr. Becky sits down with Emily Oster — economist, Brown University professor, founder of ParentData, and author of Expecting Better, Cribsheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected — to play a game: Science, or Vibes? They sort real claims parents hear all the time, on peanuts and allergy prevention, breastfeeding and attachment, sleep training, screen time, developmental milestones, and whether ChatGPT or Claude should be your parenting oracle at 11pm. Then they talk about the limits of expertise. Emily on teaching a business school class while her daughter was in the ER. Dr. Becky on the night her own psychology training couldn't talk her out of feeling like a failure. Their careers are built on having answers, and they describe the nights neither of them had one. * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. For a limited time, new subscribers to Good Inside get a year of Parent Data free! Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible: Frida: Shop Frida’s bath time collection at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED Oso & Me: Use the code OSOGOOD15 for 15% off clothes newborn through age ten Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ten days. Three weeks. Two and a half years. Ask a room full of parents when they first left their baby with someone else, and you'll get every answer there is. Dr. Becky says the number matters less than what's happening underneath it. In this solo episode, the second in a three-part series with Care.com, Dr. Becky breaks down the anxiety that shows up when it's time to hand your baby to someone else, even someone you trust. She names the pattern behind it: emotional reasoning, the habit of mistaking how scared you feel for how likely something is to go wrong. She also gives that scared part of you a name. Three moves for the next time you have to walk out the door: name the fear, make the first attempt absurdly small, and change what you ask when you get back. * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. Thank you to Care.com for making this episode possible. 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. Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Parenting is exhausting. The number of things you have to do to manage it all can feel relentless and nonstop. And no, you’re not doing anything wrong. Many parents feel this way. Today on the show, we're cross-posting a crowd favorite from "Good Inside with Dr. Becky," and tackling parental burnout, what you can do to take care of yourself, and how to bring some fun back into your life. * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible: Ergobaby: Use the code DRBECKY20 for 20% off for support at every stage LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED Oso & Me: Use the code OSOGOOD15 for 15% off clothes newborn through age ten Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cameron Oaks Rogers is pregnant with her third baby, and her 2.5-year-old will not let her out of his sight. Not "clingy" in the normal toddler way — he wants back in, physically, as close to her body as he can get. This week, Cameron and Dr. Becky trade the mic. Cameron — host of Conversations with Cam and writer of the Substack Fill Your Cup — brought her own concept to the table: "parenting is all in the marketing," the art of selling a hard moment to a kid too smart to fall for a straight-up lie. Becky brings the toddler psychology behind why he's suddenly this attached, plus a two-minute trick with toy blocks that makes an abstract thing like "a new baby is coming" concrete enough for a two-year-old to hold onto. Then it flips: Cameron asks Becky the questions. About the intrusive thoughts she's never talked about publicly before — the ones that come back every pregnancy, tied to her own history, and how she's learned to tell the difference between a thought and a threat. And about why taking care of yourself isn't something you owe your kid an apology for. * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. Thank you to Frida for making this episode possible. Shop Frida’s bath time collection at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today. Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Searching for childcare feels different from every other kind of parenting research. You can vet the daycare, read the reviews, love the nanny on paper, and still get to the door and feel your whole body say absolutely not. This episode is about that feeling, and why it runs so much deeper than logistics. Becky sits down with Good Inside’s Kate Kirschner, a licensed therapist and certified perinatal mental health expert, to pull apart what's really happening when you go looking for someone else to care for your baby. It turns out the search isn't only about your kid. It's about the version of you that's been on pause since the baby arrived, and whether she's still in there. They get practical, too. How to make a list that actually helps instead of spinning you out. What to ask in an interview when you can't name what you're even looking for. Why "good enough" beats "perfect," why no caregiving choice has to be forever, and how to be sad about a change without believing you've broken something. This is Episode One of “In Good Hands,” a three-part series with Care.com on the emotional truths of finding care for your baby. Dr. Becky and Kate wrote up some ideas for how to approach finding your first caregiver for the Good Inside blog. Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. * Thank you to Care.com for making this episode possible. For a limited time, you can use the code BECKY35 to save 35% on a Care.com 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. Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A few weeks after having a baby, a lot of new parents land on the same quiet, scary thought: something feels off, and I don't really recognize myself. Is it postpartum depression? Anxiety? Or something no one warned you about? Dr. Becky sits down with Dr. Lucky Sekhon, a reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist, to make sense of what's actually happening in your body and brain after birth. Dr. Sekhon calls it hormonal whiplash: your estrogen climbs to a hundred times its normal level in pregnancy, and then the moment the placenta leaves, you fall off a hormonal cliff. Dr. Becky turns it into an image you won't forget: you were driving 6000 miles an hour, and then you hit a wall -- and now there's a baby in the back seat. Together they walk through the thoughts that rattle new parents most: I don't feel like myself. I don't feel bonded to my baby yet. What's wrong with me? And they keep coming back to one reframe: so much of what you're blaming on your character is really just chemistry. They also get into the questions people are quietly Googling at 2am: how long to wait between pregnancies, why breastfeeding is not reliable birth control, and secondary infertility, the thing that makes it harder to get pregnant the second time. Dr. Lucky Sekhon is the author of The Lucky Egg. * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside Frida: Shop Frida’s bath time collection at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today Oso & Me: Use the code OSOGOOD15 for 15% off clothes newborn through age ten Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your baby is finally asleep. So why are you standing over the crib for the fifth time in a minute, checking that they're still breathing? If new parenthood cranked your anxiety to a setting you don't recognize, this one's for you. Dr. Becky sits down with psychologist Dr. Nicole Pensak, author of the book Rattled, and grabs a whiteboard to map the anxiety that quietly runs the show in early parenthood: the middle-of-the-night checking, the "if I feel it, it must be true" spiral, and the slow drift of avoiding more and more until your world gets small. Together they draw three cycles (reassurance, emotional reasoning, and avoidance) and, more useful still, the one small move that breaks each one. You'll walk away knowing which loop is yours, and something you can actually try today. One heads up: this episode has a whiteboard, and that's kind of the whole point. Watch it on YouTube to see the cycles drawn out. That's where it all clicks. In this episode: postpartum anxiety, intrusive thoughts, the checking cycle, emotional reasoning, avoidance, and why anxiety after a baby is more common (and more survivable) than anyone tells you. Dr. Becky wrote up the explanation to each of these cycles on the Good Inside blog.  * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible: Ergobaby: Use the code DRBECKY20 for 20% off for support at every stage LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED Frida: Shop Frida’s bath time collection at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if someone handed you a map before you started down the hardest road of your life? That's what Dr. Becky does in this solo episode — breaking down five data points every new parent needs to know. Not to scare you. To prepare you. Because the thing that spirals most new parents isn't the difficulty itself. It's being completely blindsided by things that are entirely predictable. The five numbers:  66% of births don't go according to plan. 8 to 12 feedings in 24 hours.  2 hours for a cluster feed.  1 in 5 mothers experience postpartum depression or anxiety.  Zero — the number of guaranteed postpartum home visits in the United States (and yes, we're the only wealthy country where that's true). If you're pregnant, newly postpartum, or supporting someone who is — this episode will change how you talk to yourself when it gets hard. * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible: Oso & Me: Use the code OSOGOOD15 for 15% off clothes newborn through age ten Coterie: Get 20% off with the code GOODINSIDEBABY20 Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED Frida: Shop Frida’s bath time collection at Amazon, Target, and Walmart today Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sabrina Rudin grew up expecting motherhood to come naturally to her. She was raised holistically, she ate well, she meditated, she had manifested the pregnancy. She had the nursery. She was ready. She left the hospital and felt nothing like she expected. In this episode, Sabrina shares the story of her postpartum OCD — the intrusive thoughts that flooded in, the terror of thinking something was fundamentally broken in her, and the moment she told her husband she thought she'd "become a murderer." His response changed everything. Dr. Becky and Sabrina move through the full arc: the version of herself she expected to be, the night things fell apart, eight months of therapy, and the realization that landed years later — that a thought is a thought, and she gets to choose which ones she believes. If you've ever had a thought that scared you after your baby arrived, this one's for you. Read Dr. Becky’s blog post about postpartum intrusive thoughts. And if you’re looking for additional support, take a look at The Motherhood Center’s list of resources. If you are in crisis, dial 988. * Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood. Thank you Airbnb for making this episode possible! Host your home or book your next stay on Airbnb. Learn more about Good Inside.Follow Dr. Becky on Instagram. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.