How To Talk To Kids About Anything Dr. Robyn Silverman

What to do when your child throws a tantrum? How to react when your child hits, punches, or bites? How do we help to co-regulate our child’s nervous system? And how do we head-off tantrums before they happen? As you know, we’ve entered a new way of helping our children through big emotions—moving far away from the ways our parents used to parent us and their parents used to parent our parents. Instead of pushing big feelings under the rug, hiding them in the closet or stuffing them down into our bodies like a batch of old brownies, as our understanding of developing brains has increased, today’s parents are looking for a new way to help their children understand their feelings and learn to process them. Who is leading the way for us today? Alyssa Blask Campbell is joining us for her second time today.

Special Guest: Eli Lebowitz, PhD

It's healthy and normal to become aware of possible threats and dangers around us so that we can be safe and make safe choices- however, in children with anxiety, they get stuck in continually imagining that something bad or dangerous will happen, and it feels just as if the bad thing were happening in real life. They are experiencing the feelings or anxiety as if they are indeed going to happen. They focus on what they truly believe are the negative outcomes that have a large likelihood of occurring and place high value on those negative outcomes—while at the same time, placing very low value and likelihood on positive outcomes that might occur from taking the risk and doing the thing that scares them.



Parenting an anxious child means facing constant challenges and questions: When should parents step in and help their children deal with those fears—or take away the likelihood of those fears by avoiding the thing that scares their child? How can parents foster independence while still supporting their children and acknowledging the anxiety? How can parents reduce the hold their child's anxiety has on their entire family—and cope with the role they may be inadvertently playing in kowtowing to the anxiety while trying to help their child cope with it? And how do we talk to our children about anxiety- and how we can support them in living with it in a positive way?



For this conversation, I will be talking together with Professor Eli Lebowitz.





Bio



Professor Lebowitz studies and treats childhood and adolescent anxiety and is Director of the Program for Anxiety Disorders at the Yale University’s Child Study Center. His research focuses on the development, neurobiology, and treatment of anxiety and related disorders, with special emphasis on cross-generational and familial influences on these disorders. Dr. Lebowitz is the lead investigator on multiple funded research projects, and is the author of numerous research papers, books and chapters on childhood and adolescent anxiety. He is the father of three great boys. Dr. Lebowitz has a new book out called Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD.

Well folks, we are in a digital age where we track our children’s every move through apps—access their grades within minutes of the teachers posting them, send photos at a push of a button before we’ve even considered whether or not we should share or have consent to share—yikes. I was interviewed on Good Morning America about this topic because of how the number of likes affects how a tween and teen feel about their worthiness! This can lead to the creation of an online persona that teens create to attract likes even if the persona doesn’t represent who the child is at the core— how can our kids cope with zero privacy and constant judgment? Let’s bring in my friend and friend of the show, Devorah Heitner.

We’re probably all felt it—this ever-more competitive race that today’s students run each day towards the best possible future—feeling the crushing pressure to do more, more, more, jamming their schedules full of resume-padding activities, AP classes, tutoring and whatever else that can give them an edge over the rest so that they can get into the right colleges, that gets them on the right path towards the right future. At the same time, we have skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and more—is it possible to help kids strive towards excellence without having the process crush them while on their way? For this, we are speaking with Jennifer Wallace.

 

Kara Kinney Cartwright – This podcast will focus on teaching boys to recognize the humanness in everyone—to be kind and to NOT be an assh*le. How can we teach our sons to have positive interactions, make good decisions and recognize when they are being jerkfaces? We talk about all of it on the How to Talk to Kids about Anything podcast with guest and author, Kara Kinney Cartwright.

The post How to Talk to Boys about Not Being A$$holes with Kara Kinney Cartwright- ReRelease appeared first on drrobynsilverman.com.

How can we remain mindful when we are rushing around and doing so much as parents? Dr. Robyn Silverman interviews best-selling author, Hunter Clarke Fields, on the How to Talk to Kids about Anything podcast. Hunter’s new book, Raising Good Humans Everyday, is featured.