Podcast Episodes

At the conclusion of Mental Health Awareness month, we weed through the bad advice that is so prevalent about anxiety that only makes it worse. We discuss the certain skills we must help our kids (and ourselves) develop to manage anxiety, and we talk about the things parents might try that have the…

In today’s episode Lynn answers two listener questions. First a mom discovers her 15 year old has been thinking of drinking to manage her stress. What are the conversations parents should be having with their teens around stress, substance abuse and peer pressure?And another mom raised by an anxiou…

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is often missed or just misunderstood. What is OCD and what isn’t? How does it differ from really anxious thoughts? How is it treated? While it can show up at any point in life, some kids commonly show signs around 7 when there’s a family history. Lynn explains the con…

So often the moms assume the role of supporting the family’s health and mental health, but dads have a critical role to play. What is that role? And how do you encourage your partner to step into that role? When a man is unsure of how to talk about emotions with his children, what should he say? Wh…

After an atypical year of intense togetherness with our kids, parents may be out of practice being apart from their kids. Today we talk about the separation anxiety parents feel around summer camp, because it really is harder on us that it is on them. How can we best prepare our own kids leaving ho…

The Anxious Parent: Most families have one, some families have two. But what important role does a non-anxious parent play? How do worry and control often dictate parenting dynamics that put stress on a relationship? How can you tell if anxiety is in charge of your household, and what can you do ab…

Emetaphobia, Astraphobia, Autophobia. Some kids became afraid of a variety of things: throwing up, needles, dogs, thunderstorms, the dark. As parents we want to help, we want to make our kids feels safe and comfortable. We want to address the worry. But how we do that often just makes the worry and…

Do you or your child have Social Anxiety or are we now pathologizing shyness, too? Learn the different between real signs of social anxiety or just a more introverted temperament. What skills do we need to teach our kids to help them connect with others?As we leave our quarantined isolation, some k…

In honor of May 1st's deadline for many college-bound seniors to make their choice, Lynn shares advice from her perspective over the last few decades of watching her adolescent clients go to college and struggle with anxiety. For parents, how to support academic success for their kids in a heal…

Panic Attacks. While they are incredibly common, they are often mislabeled and misunderstood. Teenagers, even adults, will casually throw the label around.What’s the difference between those really powerful moments of anxiety and a panic attack?How do you help your family members when they experien…

Mistakes and Failures can be some of life’s best teachers. When it comes to letting our kids fail, how do we know the difference between letting them fail and letting them drown? What do you do if your teenager hasn’t mastered the skill of asking for help? Or, what do you say when your teen doesn’t…

At some point one of your children’s friends will be in crisis. How do you help your teens help their friends? How do you teach them to develop boundaries with those friends? When your child shares that a friend is feeling suicidal or cutting or other self-harming behaviors, what do you do?

Many families are feeling anxious about changes to their school routine, both kids and parents. How do we support our kids and teens and help them manage their worry about going back to school? And when does this worry become more serious and lead to school avoidance and school refusal?

We talk a lot about the power of words...teaching kids to put words to their feelings, modeling emotional literacy. But the flip side of talking—the critical flip side—is listening. What happens when you don’t feel heard? What’s the toll on your mental health, royal or not? When our kids and teens …

There's a lot of bad advice out there to weed through when so many claim to be parenting or anxiety experts. But some well-meaning advice will actually strengthen your child's anxious habits, and Lynn Lyons explains why.

All parents need this pep talk about managing COVID fatigue. And we recast a very popular episode. Anxiety shows up in the body—headaches, tummy troubles, and more. We talk about how understanding the mind body connection can help manage the physical symptoms of anxiety for you and your kids.

Perfectionism and anxiety create a torture chamber we don't want to model for kids. When we reward excellence, how do we know when it becomes toxic? We explain how a parents can check their own behaviors as well as what to look for and say to their kids. Robin and Lynn discuss recent episodes on t…

This pandemic has disproportionately impacted mothers. It's putting our relationships to the test. So as we work to support our kids, there are traps we all fall into our our relationships. We talk about learning to ask for help in the right way, dropping that defensiveness, reducing that resentmen…

We end Season 2 with a bang of an episode. Finishing off our conversation about preventing anxiety in our kids, we tackle the toxicity of our achievement culture. It’s so normalized it’s invisible to us. And we answer a listener question about how to develop a strong work ethic in her 8 year old tw…

As we face a mental health crisis alongside the pandemic that we really focus on the emotional management skills that we can teach our children. It's an effective way to immunize them against emotional difficulties by talking about their emotions, raising their awareness of them, and parents modeli…

While we wait for a vaccine distribution plan to address our global pandemic, there is a mental health crisis happening simultaneously. Our numbers for anxiety were alarming even before 2020, and now, yikes. But there ways parents can promote a skill-based immunization strategy for our family’s men…

Teens are part of the age group hardest hit by the impact of the pandemic. Missing out on both the social development and high school's rituals, teens are losing motivation, sleep, and connection. Here's how to help them.

How do you support your children who feel shame very intensely? They feel shame so intensely that it might include self harming practices. What do you say when children say "I feel no worth?" Or "I can't believe I did that," or "I'm so stupid." How do you support your children who handle their mist…

At the end of a stressful year after paying tribute to those in the mental health field, Lynn gives us a road map for what personal growth really looks like. From therapy, to books, to podcasts, when we do this work, what are we working towards? What does it look like when you become a black belt i…