Good Inside with Dr. Becky

You Are the Technology That Builds Your Child's Brain

Episode Summary

Dr. Dana Suskind and Dr. Becky talk about why the messy, inconvenient, friction-filled version of connection is the version that actually wires a child's brain, and why a frictionless AI that always agrees with you might be the real risk.

Episode Notes

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: