Podcast Episodes

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 kids might be feeling out of practice being with other kids and teens again. Hear Lynn tell us how to support them.

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 healthy way can be a challenge, so Lynn offers advice for parents of kids of all ages.

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 experience them?

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 even care?

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 talk, can we tap into the full power of listening? We discuss the way the public health conversation may change after Oprah's interview with Megan and Harry.

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 the Anxiety vaccine, and ways parents can prepare their children better for difficult and awkward feelings.

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 resentment, and how improving your co-parenting will help your kids more than you know,

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 twins. Lynn has a must hear answer for kids of any age.

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 modeling emotional literacy. Lynn discusses the commons trait that most anxious parents have in common in how they raise anxious kids.

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 mental health. Is there really a vaccine for anxiety?

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 mistakes in such a way that's self-punitive, and they're unforgiving with themselves? Also, we watched the movie soul and there is a message in that movie that we want all parents to hear.

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 in emotional management?

Silliness has never been a more a critical parenting tool than in 2020. Here's how to use it to make manage your anxiety and make your kids feel safe. Creating "joy" with your family may sound like too much pressure, so we break it down to a few 2 minute increments of joy. And we discuss the toxic humor to avoid.

For some families, holidays bring out their toughest dynamics. How do divorced parents manage a blended holiday putting their kids first? What if you have a house of angry teenagers with one of them recently in crisis? Is it possible to enjoy your holiday at home when all they want to do is fight? On a lighter note, what secrets does Gilligan's Island hold for every quarantined family?

What if COVID is giving you a pass this year that relieves you? What if you're glad to miss a family holiday? One listener hates Christmas because of her overbearing and difficult mother? How do you set boundaries with your parents? And is it ever too late?

Santaphobia is real. Santa can freak some kids out. How do you help your child who’s afraid Santa will bring COVID into the house? How do you help the child who doesn’t want to hear anything at all about Santa? And how can the Santa story creep into toxic territory when used as a threatening or shaming tool? Do you do that? What’s a healthy way to talk about Santa?

What if your kids are freaking out that they can't celebrate their December holidays in the usual way this year? What if you are? Parents have an exceptional burden this year trying to make magic when they probably don't feel it. How do you manage the disappointment everyone feels and find inspiration to make the best of a situation this December?

If you have an anxious tween or teen who didn't like joining in before, how do you support them in a pandemic with remote learning? And another parent asks about her six year old's struggles with blaming others and finding friends. What do you say to the child who says, "Nobody likes me?"

Lynn Lyons, therapist, author, and speaker is one of the world's experts on helping parents, kids, and teens manage anxiety. She talks with co-host and sister-in-law Robin Hutson in a weekly podcast free of psychobabble and full of concrete advice to help parents and their manage worry. Her strategies apply to both those adults and children with anxiety disorders as well as thier prevention.