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.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Pampers Easy Ups: Start your potty training journey with Peppa Pig Pampers Easy Ups
• Airbnb: Host your home or book your next stay on Airbnb
• LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside
• Oso & Me: Use the code OSOGOOD15 for 15% off clothes newborn through age ten
• 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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If you’ve yelled at your kid, you’re not a bad parent. You’re a good parent with an overwhelmed nervous system. In today’s revisit from the Good Inside archives, Dr. Becky breaks down the science behind yelling, snapping, and shutting down. She explains why our bodies react before our brains can catch up – and how understanding this will help you pause, reset, and reconnect.

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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
• 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.

Your kid hits. Melts down the second you leave the house. Argues about everything, all day, every single day. You've tried the time-outs, the consequences, the calm-down corner. Nothing works. Why are we always at that cliff?

Dr. Becky spent two hours in a Reddit thread literally called "Nothing Works" and pulled three real posts to build this episode. Her answer: you're intervening at the cliff, when the real leverage is on the road that led there. She walks through the exact minute-by-minute buildup (the snack request, the "just one more minute," the phone glance) where a parent could've exited before the blowup, plus scripts you can actually use.

Back to school brings big changes - new routines, new teachers, new challenges. Our new Back To School program helps you prepare for day one, navigate tricky moments, and build your kid's resilience.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Pampers Easy Ups: Start your potty training journey with Peppa Pig Pampers Easy Ups
• Airbnb: Host your home or book your next stay on Airbnb
• 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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does depression look like? It’s not always… sadness. It can be anger. Irritability. Picking fights. Checking out. Taking risks that don't make sense. It can look, to everyone around you — including you — like a character problem, not a medical condition.

Christopher Choukalas is an ICU physician at UCSF. Six months after his twin daughters were born, he had every symptom on the paternal postpartum depression list. He had no idea.

In this episode, Dr. Becky and Dr. Choukalas go through the symptom list live — and talk about why this form of depression is so easy to miss, what it costs the whole family when it goes unnamed, and what getting help actually looked like for one father who needed it badly.

Christopher G. Choukalas, MD, MS is the author of Even the Darkest Night: A Father's Journey of Hope and Healing from Paternal Depression.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today
• LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside
• Girl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn more
• Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when two become three, or four, or five? Who is responsible for the needs and wants of a couple when days are filled with playdates, pick-ups, and meal preps? Nights lack the erotic energy that couples need not only to survive but to thrive. This week, Dr. Becky consults with the renowned couples therapist, Esther Perel, to talk about what parents can do to rekindle their desires.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today
• Airbnb: Host your home or book your next stay on Airbnb
• LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside
• Skylight: Get $30 off a 15-inch Skylight Calendar at myskylight.com/becky

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Belle Burden was, by her own account, the good girl. Quiet, compliant, the kid who wrote her own book report and did her homework on Friday afternoons. Then one night in the second week of the 2020 lockdown, a stranger left a voicemail: your husband is having an affair with my wife. By 6 a.m. her 20-year marriage was over, and the life she thought she could count on stopped making sense.

In her memoir of the event and its aftermath, Strangers, Belle traces how she got to this place - and how she found her way back.

They get into the stuff we all carry: why "being good" can quietly cost you yourself, how kids notice far more than we give them credit for, and why it's never too late to tell them the truth.

Dr. Becky wrote up her thoughts on how to get the "good girl" tendency out of your own emotional driver seat.

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Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Girl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn more
• LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside
• Pampers Easy Ups: Start your potty training journey with Peppa Pig Pampers Easy Ups
• Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There's a lot of noise about what AI will do to jobs. What will it do to one of the most important jobs in the world: parenting?

Dr. Dana Suskind is a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon and neuroscientist who has spent her career on how young brains get built. In this conversation, she and Dr. Becky start with a piece of bait — can a parent be replaced by a machine? — and spend the next half hour on the science of why the answer is no.

They get into attachment and why the messy, inconvenient, friction-filled version of connection is the version that actually wires a child's brain. Why a frictionless AI that always agrees with you might be the real risk. A rubric (DETECT) for judging any piece of kid-facing tech before it comes in the house. And the idea Dana calls the most freeing thing she learned writing her new book: good-enough parenting isn't a nice thing to say, it's a biological necessity.

Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:

• Ole Henriksen: Use the code DRBECKY30 for 30% off the Banana Bright+ Eye Crème
• Airbnb: Host your home or book your next stay on Airbnb
• SmartyPants: Shop SmartyPants Vitamins at Target, Walmart, or Amazon today
• Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When a woman becomes a mother, her brain physically reorganizes around the baby. We've known this for a while. What we didn't know (until recently) is that the same thing happens to dads.

Dr. Darby Saxbe is a neuroscientist and psychologist at USC, and one of the only researchers in the world scanning fathers' brains before and after they have kids. What she found: the same regions that change and streamline in new mothers change in new fathers. The more hands-on a dad is, the more pronounced those changes are.

Dr. Becky and Dr. Darby get into what "losing gray matter" actually means (it's not what it sounds like), how paternal postpartum depression shows up differently than maternal (and why it almost always goes unrecognized), and why the awkwardness of new fatherhood isn't a signal that you're wrong for the role.

Dr. Saxbe's new book is Dad Brain.

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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
• LMNT: Get a free gift with your purchase at drinkLMNT.com/goodinside
• Girl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn more
• Little Spoon: Get 50% off your first order at littlespoon.com/rattled with code RATTLED

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.