Ep 235: Parenting Through Anxiety: Practical Advice from Lynn Lyons (Replay)

In this replay of episodes 31 and 32 of Your Child Is Normal, anxiety expert and psychotherapist Lynn Lyons shares practical, reassuring advice for parents raising anxious kids.

The conversation covers:

• how anxiety shows up in children
• why reassurance can sometimes worsen anxiety
• how avoidance strengthens fear
• ways parents unintentionally accommodate anxiety
• practical strategies to help children build resilience and confidence

Lynn explains the difference between normal worry and anxiety disorders, and offers concrete language and tools families can use at home right away.

To learn more from Lynn Lyons (highly encouraged!), visit lynnlyons.com and check out her podcast Flusterclux.

Your Child is Normal is the trusted podcast for parents, pediatricians, and child health experts who want smart, nuanced conversations about raising healthy, resilient kids. Hosted by Dr. Jessica Hochman — a board-certified practicing pediatrician — the show combines evidence-based medicine, expert interviews, and real-world parenting advice to help listeners navigate everything from sleep struggles to mental health, nutrition, screen time, and more.

Follow Dr Jessica Hochman:
Instagram: @AskDrJessica and Tiktok @askdrjessica
YouTube channel: Ask Dr Jessica

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The information presented in Ask Dr Jessica is for general educational purposes only.  She does not diagnose medical conditi...

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Hi everybody, and welcome back to Your Child is Normal today. I'm replaying a favorite conversation from this podcast with anxiety specialist Lynn Lyons. Now, as a pediatrician, I talk with so many parents who are looking for guidance on how to help their children manage their anxiety, and Lynn is one of the people I trust most on this topic. She's a speaker, mom, and host of Fluster Clubs, a podcast offering authentic, compassionate, straight talk for parents navigating anxiety and big emotions. I recommend her podcast to parents all of the time, because her advice is practical, reassuring, and genuinely helpful. But more than anything, I find Lynn to be incredibly real, wise, and funny. I could honestly listen to Lynn give advice all day long, and I know you're going to love her too. This conversation is packed with insight, reassurance, and practical tools for anxious kids and anxious parents alike. And if you know somebody who could benefit from hearing it, please share this episode with them. Now, onto my conversation with Lynn Lyons. How are you, Lynn? I'm fine, Jessica. Thanks for having me. I'm.. I couldn't be more thrilled to have you on as a guest. I. I love your podcast, Fluxster Fluster Clubs, Fluster Clubs. Yeah, it's got a nice catchy sound. I like it a lot. Yeah, it's memorable. And tell us about the podcast, tell us about the theme of it, and what you know what you're directing it towards. Yeah, so the sort of the tagline is, is for parents who worry, sort of, with the implication that we all worry, so it's for everybody. I'm an anxiety specialist, so I talk a lot about specific anxiety stuff. You know, people send in questions they want to know about what do they do at bedtime when their child is too nervous to get to sleep, or how do we get them to school, or what about kids that are afraid of thunderstorms, and then really just in general talking about the absolute necessity for parents to manage their own worry to convey skills to teach skills of emotional management. I am, as a therapist, I am really, really, really focused on developing skills. What are the things that we need to teach kids, and how do we model them? So, a lot of the podcast has to do with what's the connection between family anxiety, and how does this thing grab hold, and what do we do, and how do you respond in the moment. So, that's basically it. We've, we've talked about probably everything you can think of, we've talked about, and I, what I really like about your podcast, is you say that you take things you know, serious topics, but in a not so serious way, right, right, right. That really resonates with me. Oh, good. I'm glad. Well, humor is humor is so essential, it's such a great way to connect, and anxiety loves to be taken seriously, right. Anxiety just wants to turn everything into an emergency, and I say to families all the time, I'm not playing. I'm not playing. Your anxiety wants to turn this into a major. I was just talking to a mom today about her son's college process, which is just starting, and I, I said, I want you to, I want you to take out a piece of paper, I want you to write this down. This is not an emergency. She's like, okay, I'm writing it down, but that's that's what anxiety does. It just wants to, you know, juice everything up, and I, I'm not playing. Yeah. Now, is it.. is it just me, or does it feel like in the past couple years it seems like every kid has anxiety? I think what's so hard is there's always something to worry about. There's always a story on the news. There's always a new concern, and I think it's so hard to have those skills to learn how to manage all these new stories that pop up well, and that's that's the issue, is that if you're always trying to manage the new story, then you're gonna have difficulty, because there's always a new story, and if you treat the new story as if it's a brand new problem now that we have to deal with, you miss the bigger picture, which is that anxiety is all about trying to get certainty. It's all about trying to make sure you know exactly what's going to happen. So, what's interesting when we, when we look at kids sort of developmentally as they're moving through anxiety, that the anxiety will grab on to the things that are most developmentally uncertain, so we know that separation anxiety in little kids shows up, because that's when you're learning how to move away from Mommy and Daddy. If I've got kids that are worriers, I can, I can really predict that as they go through school and hit middle school, and hit high school, as they learn about the big kind of scary things in life, their anxiety is going to be like, oh, just sort of like, you know, licking its chops, so to speak, you know, kids learn about sex, they freak out about that, they learn about drugs, they freak out about that, they learn about suicide, they freak out about that, because it's this new content that has all this uncertainty, and it just happens. Yeah, I think what's so hard, as a parent, you know, myself, I feel like when I was growing up, I don't remember kids being that anxious, I remember it, you know, creeping into my life and my friends' lives more. For I would say the teenage years, as you mentioned, like college applications and getting into college and grades, but I feel like now it's so pervasive even amongst the elementary school years. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think so. So, you know, I'm a, I'm a family systems person, and I look a lot at how it's passed down generation generationally in families, and so I'm really paying attention to how parents are dealing with uncertainty. So, what are the messages that we're giving kids about the way the world works? And if we were growing up and the message was like, go out and play, right, but now if you're growing up, if the message is, if you leave the house, make sure you have your phone, and I'm going to turn on the life 360 so that I can know exactly where you are. If you change locations, you have to text me. There's all what I call safety chatter. There's so much talk about how dangerous the world is. Yes, you know, my, but my, I grew up on a cul-de-sac when, until I was in third grade, there were 32 other little kids on the cul-de-sac, and my mom says, like, the older girls who were like seven would come to the door and knock on the door and say, "Can we take Lydia out? I was two, and my mom would be like, "Sure, you know. And now it's sort of like, "Well, we have to make sure that you've taken an American Red Cross babysitting course, right. It's just, it's just so different in the way that we convey risk to kids. I mean, I think that that's what, what comes across so clearly is the difference in it that we as adults convey risk. I completely agree. I talk about this with my husband, that when we were both kids growing up, we played outside all the time, we played with our neighbors, we'd sort of come in to the house, there was a tacit agreement that when it was dark outside we'd be back, but now I feel like I don't think it's just the community I live in in Southern California, but I think it's happening all over, where kids are not going outside as much, and I don't know if it's because they're on video games more, or parents are more nervous, or just culturally it's different. I think probably a combination of all of those things. Yes, I think that technology has done a few things. One is that it's provided in-home entertainment, so you don't have to go outside and use your imagination to be entertained. You can be entertained on a couch for hours and hours and hours. I think that technology also has given adults and now kids this. The reality is that you can know everything all the time, so you can know where your kids are all the time, you can know the answers to every question, you can track and see where your parents are, if you're a kid, and it's just this idea over and over and over again that I am capable of knowing everything. So then, when I don't know something, oh my gosh, that's an emergency. Yeah, it's very true. Yeah, we have to sort of learn to be okay with not knowing everything all the time, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think you know, even think about when you know, if you think about the way that you were raised, or I think about the way that I was raised. I was raised by very attentive, attentive, loving parents. It wasn't like, you know, I was left alone, and that got, you know, they didn't go off on vacation and just leave us in the house, but we went and did things that they had no idea that we were doing, and we would build these forts in the backyard with nails and hammers, and we built this huge hole in our backyard and covered it with a board, and we put our little siblings in the hole, it is just like, right? I mean, we just did stuff, and we were no, our parents didn't know. Well, then you know, like, when they would find out sometimes, because they'd be like, 'Hey, where did Cheryl go? And go, 'Oh my gosh, we left her in the hole. So, I mean, they'd find out, so it wasn't like we were.. it wasn't like they were ignoring us, or that they weren't recognizing there were risks, you know, there were rules of which streets you could cross and who you had to be with, and that kind of stuff, but the length of the leash was longer. I heard you mentioned this on your, on one of your podcasts, that the way a lot of parents show that they care is by paying a lot of attention to to kids ailments, to their concerns, to anxieties that they have, you know, when kids do have anxieties, what, what would your advice be to parents on how to approach kids that come home and they're, you know, they express maybe a, you know, an anxiety or something that they're nervous about for the first time, yeah, so the two most important words, and I say this all the time, the two most important words that I have as a therapist are, of course, of course, you feel worried about that, of course, oh gosh, that's a, that's a new thing, or and we could, we could say that for any emotion, right, of course, you're sad that you got cut from the basketball team. Of course, you're upset that somebody was unkind to you. Of course, you're disappointed that they ran out of pizza while you were in the pizza line, and being able to talk to kids about feeling unsure and normalizing it, instead of right away jumping in. If a child comes home and says, I'm really nervous about this, well, then we better go in and we better create certainty. We have to make sure, and this is this has really become rampant in the way that we're dealing with kids' anxiety or their nervousness. Is that really focusing on how do we make sure that they feel okay all the time? How do we make sure that they know exactly what's going to happen, so when a child comes home and is upset about something, or worried about something, or they're doing something new, the best thing we can do as a parent is to say, well, of course, you feel nervous about that, is there any problem solving we need to do here, or to even say, well, how did you handle it, how did you handle that? Gosh, that sounds tough. What did you do, and really modeling over and over for kids that you're not supposed to know exactly what's going to happen. That's why my one of my very favorite homework assignments that I give to families is at dinner at night, sitting around the table, what was the unexpected thing that happened to you, and how did you manage it? So that we're there, and parents give examples too, you know. You make it age appropriate, of course, but parents give examples of things happen, and then how did you manage it? And a lot of the therapy that I do with anxious kids when they come in is they know that when they come in, I'm going to say, I want to tell me your successes, and it's success doesn't mean that you avoided anxiety, it means that you stepped into something, and what unexpected thing happened to you? Tell me about some something that was felt really, really scary, or tell me about something that you felt really nervous about, and how did you get through it? So I'm giving, giving the message all the time that it's, you're supposed to feel uncertain. I love this, because one, you're actually making things that are the idea that something is unexpected actually expected. Yeah, yeah, expect the unexpected. I mean, that's that's rule number one, is expect worry to show up. Why, because life is uncertain, right? And when we, when we get in there, and we say, all right, let's make sure that my child never feels uncertain, you know. Parents say that to me, like it's really important that she knows exactly what's going to happen, and I go, well, you know, that's kind of the opposite of what we want to do, and that can be hard for parents, because they want to keep their kids safe, right? It feels intuitive. It feels.. it feels like that, that's what they're supposed to do. Yeah, and I love that you say the words about, of course, because I think when you.. we all know that when we do have concerns and we do have problems, it feels nice to have our feelings validated, right? You know, if I tell my husband about a problem I'm having, if he says to me, 'No, you don't really feel like that, you shouldn't worry about that, it doesn't feel very good. Right, right, yeah. If we say, and this is another, another tip, too, for parents is to stay out of the why questions and focus on the how questions, because, say, you know, just in that validating way, say a child comes home and says, I feel really nervous about giving my talk in class, and we say, well, why would you be nervous? Your teacher is so nice, right? Right. Instead, we say, well, how can we handle your nervousness? Why are you upset about that? Why are you crying? Why are you making such a big deal about that? All of that is just so dismissive, isn't it? Very, yeah, it does. It really resonates. Your advice really resonates with me. If you could say to the.. it sounds so much better to say to your child, of course, you'd be nervous about speaking in front of your class. It's very hard to speak in front of your class. I get nervous speaking in front of people. Yeah, and so, how can.. how can we help, right? Right? How can I help you with that, or how do you think to say to get them curious? How do people learn how to speak in front of other people? You know, gosh, there are some people who love to speak in front of other people, and some people who, oh my gosh, they would rather quit school. How do you think somebody learns how to do that, and you get them curious, and you talk about it as a skill that you have to build rather than something that you have to avoid. Yeah, that's a big difference. I also, you've mentioned this before on your podcast about this idea that parents want to protect their children from all ill happening. I love your example about the teachers. I was thinking about this yesterday, because I was talking to a friend where her child's having trouble with her with her teacher and experience, and I love that you acknowledge that things, you know, experiences don't have to be perfect for kids, that we can learn from those experiences. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that. And if we're talking about, you know, we hear the words resilience a lot, we hear the words grit, we hear all this, you know, language of sort of toughening kids up. To me, it's not really about toughening them up, it's about recognizing that things are going to be bumpy sometimes, right. And the way, the way you know that you can handle something is that somebody lets you handle it, right? The way, the way you know that you'll get over a broken heart is that you get your heart broken, and then your heart heals, right? The way you get over disappointment is that something doesn't go the way you want it to go. The way you get over embarrassment is that you do something embarrassing, and then it feels horrible, and then in a year you can laugh about it. I mean, I have so many stories that I talk to kids about, like just the humiliating things that have happened to me, and now I can laugh about that. At the time, it felt terrible, and it's just really normalizing and making room for all of the ups and downs, letting them get to the other side. They've got to be allowed to get to the other side. That's so nice that you can give stories on your, you know, of your own life. I think that really does help. Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty, as a therapist, you know, I think a lot of people don't want to go to therapy or resist because they think that you're going to be all serious and sort of say, say annoying things like, so how does that make you feel, or or say more, right? I mean, so annoying, and I think kids learn pretty quickly, adults too, I see a fair amount of adults too, that it's just me and that I'm a human being, and I tell stories, and you know, we laugh, and it's, it's really being able to sort of connect with people that we're all having these experiences, and it really is okay. Yeah, normalizing feelings, that's right. Yeah, just making lots of room for them, and, and you know, the other thing you said, too, which I think is so, so important, is that a lot of times parents feel like they're supposed to worry, they're supposed to make sure nothing happens, because they're, they're afraid they're going to emotionally damage their kids, and I also think there's a lot of pressure between parents that, you know, say you were the mom that said, like, no, you guys can go and do what you want, like other moms are gonna be like, oh my gosh, like Jessica, Jessica is so negligent. Did you see her letting her children outside? Yeah, I'm sure it's been said before. I was laughing with my husband the other day because there was this funny little video of this little boy walking through a puddle, and we were laughing because there was, there was a park near my house, they've since paid the paved the parking lot, but it used to just be dirt, so in the spring it was just these, you know, disgusting puddles, which, of course, have disgusting things in them, and I have two boys, they're two years apart, they were probably like two and four, and they are in the puddles, and I know there's gross stuff in the puddles, and this woman says to me, she looks, I mean, they're just covered, and she looks at me, and she says, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe that you let your boys go to those puddles. And I turned to, I said, "Oh, my kids are washable, are yours? My kids are washable? That I took all their clothes off, and I put them naked in the car seat, and we went home, and I like soaked them for a while, right? But it's just this idea that other parents will be like, "Oh my gosh, she's so negligent, I can't believe she's letting her children do that. Yeah, we have to get over that. If we could definitely have been mom friends, you're right. Yeah, let them play, let them play. Absolutely, because I think about picking my battles with my kids. If we worry about everything, that's just a tough way to live. Yeah, yeah. Well, and even when we think about, you know, one of the, one of the ways that anxiety is so powerful is our rigidity, our perfectionism, and things have to go a certain way, right? Because that's what anxiety says in all of its forms, anxiety says things have to go a certain way, and so, as a parent, what I hope people learn as a parent is you do have to pick your battles, right? I mean, my mom used to say, like, that's why bedrooms have doors, right, so that I can close it and not see what's going on on the other side, and it's a matter of being able to say to kids, this is your mess, you have to deal with it, you have to get yourself up for school. I mean, all of those skills of saying, well, if you don't get up for school, you might be late, or if you don't hand that that homework in, it's going to be between you and your teacher. All of that autonomy and all of that flexibility as parents is the opposite of the, you know, the perfectionism that says it has to go a certain way, right? Yeah, so it's hard. It is really hard. I, it is really hard, because I think when kids are first born, we, you know, they are fully dependent on us, and they're supposed to be totally dependent on us, and I think knowing. When to back away, I think that's tricky for a lot of us. It is, and, and you, you, it feels good as a parent, isn't it, to be the one that provides all of that care and all that safety and all that protection. It feels good, and then they get to a certain age, and now suddenly the rules are going to change, right? So, yeah, it's hard. It's hard, but I'd like to think it could also feel good to see them being more autonomous and more independent. Yeah, well, it's a paradigm shift, right? So, so what are you going to take pride in as a parent? Are you going to take pride in the fact that your children are perfectly dressed, and they never get dirty, and they never have bumps on their head, and everything goes as planned, and you, you have them in all the activities. Are you going to take pride in the fact that you run your house so smoothly at what price, by the way, or are you going to take pride in the fact that your five year old gets up for their first day in kindergarten and picks out, picks out an outfit and comes down the stairs, and you're like, look at you, right? What are you good at? What are you going to take pride in the, the ability to let our kids have some distance from us, some loving distance from us. That's the opposite of what anxiety wants, right? Anxiety wants to make sure, and when we let our kids have this distance, when we let them screw up, when we let them figure out who they are, and again, it's not all or nothing. It's not like you're saying to your five year old, you know what? If you want to take the car, take the car, but you're, you're giving them this room, right? You're lengthening the leash, you're not letting go of the leash completely, you're lengthening the leash. Yeah, I think that's very well said. And I think a lot of parents, they'll talk to me because they themselves recognize that they are anxious and they don't want to put it on their kids. Do you have any general advice for parents in that situation, where they, they, they know that they're anxious? Yeah, yeah. And so, so knowing that is a really great first step, because a lot of parents don't really recognize it. So, it's wonderful if a parent says to you, you know, I'm anxious, and I want to make sure that I don't. There's a few important things to pay attention to. One is parental control, just like we were talking about, is a big risk factor, and one of the reasons that parents control is something that the research calls parental experiential avoidance, which means that you have a really difficult time with your distress and seeing your child in distress, so if you are a parent and you know that you're anxious, you really have to work on tolerating distress, being okay with the fact that your child is going to be uncomfortable, that they're going to be upset, that they're going to be angry at you and tolerating that, that's a really great thing to think about, and the other thing is expressing your fears in front of your children, that safety chatter that I was talking about. So anxious parents tend to have a running commentary of what catastrophic thing might be coming next, so if you're, if you're with an anxious parent, you will hear a constant stream of, okay, be careful, oh, watch out, oh wait, oh no, come over, oh wait, oh, you're gonna, and that safety chatter, so we know that that constant, that constant stream of the world is a dangerous place, is also a really big risk factor for developing anxiety. Yeah, so if parents paid attention to those two things, they would be way ahead of the game. I also really like how you talk about discussing feelings that, that kids should be, you know, getting that skill of talking about your, their, your child's feelings with your children. Yeah, emotional literacy, I mean, when they, when we look at, there are things that predict better mental health outcomes for kids, and the ability to talk about what's going on inside of you, and, and articulate that is one of those things. Yes, and little, little kids need help with that, right? Right. So, so they need help, and they need language. Oh, it looks like you're feeling this, and it doesn't mean that then their feelings run the family. It doesn't mean that the feelings are in charge of the family bus, but it does mean that they begin to, they begin to identify what's going on inside of them. That also helps a lot with when we look at anxiety, when we look at somatic symptoms, so kids that are really talking about tummy aches or headaches, or what we call vague somatic symptoms. Kids that are able to talk about and make the connection between their mind and their body, how their feelings make their body feel, do much better. Also, right? Yeah. No, I definitely agree with that. I, when I see younger kids that have chronic stomach aches or chronic headaches, one of the first. We have to think about is, is there stress being put in their tummies or their heads, very common, right, very common. And the younger they are, there are two things that increase the likelihood that a kid is going to be somatic in their presentation, and one is the age, so the younger they are, because they don't have a language, and then whether or not a parent is anxious and also somatic, right. So, and you know, lots of times I'll hear people say, I've heard a lot of, I've heard a lot of experts, and I, I know them, that will say, like, parents are not responsible for their child's anxiety, or we don't want to blame parents for their child's anxiety, and, of course, it's not about blame, but it's silly to me to think that as social creatures, you've got this, you've got this little child who does all of these things because that's the way your family does them, right? Like, you have, they speak the language you speak and they hold their fork because you showed them, and what you do for holidays and what your family rituals are. Why do you think that when it comes to anxiety, suddenly the rules are going to be different. It's really okay to just say, as social creatures, we pass these things down, and so being able to say to parents, you make a difference. I don't want to say to parents, oh, you have nothing to do with it. That to me is a rather powerless place for parents to be. I want them just like the parents that you, that you meet with that, say I'm anxious, and I want to, I want to prevent prevention. Let's talk about prevention. Let's think about what you're going to do differently. Let's think about how you were parented and how you want to interrupt those patterns, right. It's just very powerful, and to talk about the fact that that that patterns are generational, right. So, if you, if you, if you think about substance abuse, if you think about how that's passed down in families, and how it's really important to talk about that in a very open and direct way. Yes. Well, I also like how between generations, I think if you do talk about things, that's that's the path towards improvement. That's right. I think about my, my dad's dad did not like feelings. My dad was not allowed to cry. Crying was not okay. Feelings were not okay. And then I can see how I was raised differently, and even with my own kids, I would say we're much more open. But it makes a big difference when you can talk about feelings. Question for you, as an anxiety specialist, you talked about teenagers, and you know all the electronics. When parents ask you about your perspective on cell phones and kids or technology and kids, what.. what I know, what advice I give. What I'm curious, what do you say to parents? I say, wait as long as possible. So I say, you know, I really don't think a fourth grader needs a smartphone. I have. I realistically say these things are going away, and so you can give your kids ways to communicate with you, but they don't have to have access to all of social media and that kind of stuff. So I really am like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I say, if you can wait until seventh or eighth grade, that would be awesome, and not give your kids a phone, and then once they have a phone, you really want to be very diligent about what they're looking at and what they're getting access to, because it's all right there in the palm of their hand, and then the other thing that I am really adamant about is you should not let your kids have their phones in the bedroom, and that should go, that should be a habit we should all have. That habit, phones in the bedroom at night, we know that kids stay up, they're on their phones. I was talking to a girl the other day, she says, "I just couldn't sleep all night, and I said, How did that go? She goes, Well, I mean, I got into bed at like 1030 and then I was just like tossing and turning until like 11, and then I just didn't sleep all night. I said, Well, what did you do from 11 to whenever? She goes, I was just like on my phone all night. I said, So you weren't trying to fall asleep, that would be like me saying to you, this is what I said to her, that would be like me saying to you, I did not sleep all night. I went outside and I ran around my house all night, and I could not fall asleep. You're doing something that's completely incompatible and falling asleep. So I am. I really say to parents, you know, you can limit this. And I wonder if you experience this too, working with parents. It seems that the most responsible parents, parents that are really good at setting limits and boundaries and all sorts of things, seem to sort of lose their minds when it comes to setting limits about phones, like as if, as if they lose the ability to say no, that if they say no to their kids, you know, I, they'll, I had this parent come in once and said, well, we weren't going to give her a phone, I think she was 10, we weren't going to give her a phone, she's out in the waiting room, we weren't going to give her a phone, and then my mother-in-law went behind our backs and got her a phone, and now we just like, we, we do not know what to do, I was like, you really don't know what to do, you, you take the phone away, what if she gave her a tarantula, would you be like an. Now, what do we do? Just take away the phone, but it's really hard somehow for parents to set limits with technology, and it's so, so important once it started, they can't go backwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I say to parents, you can say, if you're, if you, if you've got a fifth grader and the phone is in the bedroom now, maybe you're not going to be able to take away the phone completely. You can say to them, I have made a terrible mistake, and I have screwed up, and this is not good, and I'm the phone cannot be in the bedroom now, and they'll be like, but then they'll be so mad, yeah, they'll be so mad, and I've read that 90% of Americans sleep with their phone at arms at arm's distance, and such a striking change from 20 years ago, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah, and I don't know what the statistic is, but it's probably similar to what percentage of people the first thing they do when they wake up is look at their phone, and not just to turn off the alarm, but like they look at Twitter or something. It's sort of like the 1960s equivalent of lighting up a cigarette before you even get out of bed, right? Yeah, and I do. I do think I don't.. I'm curious, what you think, but I do think it contributes to anxiety for a lot of teens. Oh, absolutely. Yep, yep, yeah, yeah. There's some really good.. there's some really good research on that, that you know, it keeps coming out over and over again. Jean Twenge, who wrote, she writes books on generations, so she wrote a book called Generation Me, but she does a lot of research on the trends in generations, and she said in an article she wrote in The Atlantic a few years ago, there is a really straight line between the amount of time that kids spend on screens and the likelihood that they are going to be anxious and depressed, and she said she said in the article there are no exceptions, so there's always the issue between well, is it correlation or causality, but the amount of time that a kid is looking at a screen, that a kid is on social media, and in particular passively on social media, so that makes a difference with parents. I mean, with kids and adults, is that if you're on social media, but you're doing it in a way in which you are actively engaged in supporting a cause or helping other people, or whatever, you do better, but if you are passively on social media, then the likelihood of that increasing your anxiety and increasing your depression is pretty profound. That makes sense, like you're just looking at what other people are doing, the fun they're having. Yeah, you're not partaking. I could see that. Yeah, social comparison theory says when you compare yourself to somebody else, you generally compare down, so when we were kids, you know, I got left out of a lot of things, but I wasn't then watching everybody do the thing that I got left out of, right? Right? Like, I knew, yeah, I knew I didn't get invited to the party, but then I wasn't like watching the party sat in my bedroom, right? Right, it's terrible. Yeah, it's so, so hard. I mean, such a good point. I'm thinking about parties that I clearly remember not being invited to, and being sad about it, and just making other plans. But if I was watching the party, that would feel terrible, terrible. Yeah, look at how much fun they're having, look at what they're doing, look at here, my three best friends, like, you know, taking selfies, and I'm home with my mom playing Yahtzee, right? Terrible, terrible, terrible. And you were probably having more fun with your mom playing Yahtzee all day. Yeah, maybe, maybe, yeah, yeah. So, so, and then I did get a few. I reached out to some parents, telling them that I was going to be talking to you, and I did get a few other questions that I, if it's okay, one to sure by you. I can hear you forever. By the way, it's true. Say the same thing, they'll come back around, they'll come back. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so I had a parent ask me. She said, you know, they're spending more time home. She and her husband are home more because they're working from home, and they've been bickering around the kids, and one parent feels like it's okay for the kids to see them, you know, fight in front of the children, that it's healthy for kids to see what fighting looks like, and the other parent feels really uncomfortable about it and doesn't want to fight in front of the kids. Do you have thoughts on that, you know, in that situation? Yeah, so there's a few factors. One is that what is the content of the fight, so exposing kids to fighting material, so to speak, that is above their pay grade, you know. So, if they're fighting about things that are really going to impact their lives, if they're bickering about who is going to call the man to fix the furnace? That's one thing, but if they're bickering about whether or not they should stay married, or they're bickering about whether or not grandma's going to stop drinking, that that's that's difficult. Yes, but so in that, let's just set aside fights that parents are having that are the content is really too much. Kids to handle that shouldn't happen, but the normal argument that happens if you're in a marriage, the key to it is kids seeing you resolve it. So they've actually done research where there are families where a child will say, or a grown child will say, I never saw my parents have an argument. I never saw them have an argument. You think, oh, isn't that fantastic? Well, maybe, maybe not. If they see parents having conflict in reasonable ways, right, they're not throwing vases at each other. And then they see the parents work through it, and they see the parents talk about it, or they even say to the kids, we got to go and have a discussion, we'll get back to you, and they go and have a discussion, and then the kids see the parents be okay. That's really healthy. That's really healthy, and that's real life. I think that's real life. When you get to know people well enough, it's inevitable you're going to have conflict. And so I think, what a great skill for kids to see resolution, yeah. So, and when we talk about some really great social skills for kids to have, relationship repair is one of the huge ones, and so, especially if you've got like middle schoolers right now, because they, they really have big, you know, friendship problems. Yes, relationship repair is something that's really helpful to model, so if, if parents, if there are parents who never ever fight, well, good on you, because I don't do that, but, but it really is okay, the constant bickering, if the bickering is constant, and they're just sort of at each other all the time, then that's something you want to pay attention to, one of the things that so marriage couple researchers and the Gottmans are two, Julie and John Gottman, that really look at marriages and relationships, one of the things they can do, and they can, they can predict with over 90% accuracy whether or not a marriage will survive after watching a very short interaction, and it's based on contempt. So, so, so, contempt is a really corrosive emotion to have in relationships. So, if the parents are bickering, and it's sort of, you know, disrespectful and contemptuous, that needs to be addressed, because you're going down the wrong path, and you're teaching your children, and you're probably going to show your kids how to have a bad relationship, but contempt is something you really want to pay attention to. I can see that it's uncomfortable to be around, you know, if I'm around a couple where you see that contempt for one another, I know, and you can pick it up right away. Yeah, you're like,"Oh god, this is terrible. Yeah, right. They're snide remarks, and they put each other down. And yeah, another question, a lot of kids have, and this happens all the time, but I do think maybe with the pandemic, maybe there's been some more, or parents have brought it up more, but kids that have nightmares. How should parents help children that have nightmares? I had one parent that started sleeping next to their child, and now they can't get away from that habit. What's a healthy way to approach nightmares? Yeah, so sleeping next to your child is usually doesn't go well, so nightmares are normal, right? It's normal for kids to have nightmares. You, what you know, if they're having nightmares every night, that's something different. If they've gone through something and they're having a recurrent nightmare, one of the things that's interesting with little kids, when they wake up in the night, oftentimes little kids don't really remember nightmares and can't really articulate nightmares, and there's some even research that says that little kids are not really having nightmares, but they wake up and then they get scared, and so they come running into your bedroom, and the way to the, the, the shorthand to "I'm going to get in bed with you" is I had a bad dream, so they learned that, so they wake up, they kind of freak out, I had a bad dream. But if you have a kid that's having a lot of nightmares, there's some interesting things you can do. One thing is, before they go to bed, if it's a recurrent nightmare, if there's a theme, you can walk them through the nightmare and tell a story where they change the ending of the nightmare, and we do that with kids all the time, and it really works. So, say you've got this this little person who says, I keep having a dream that somebody comes in and steals me. So then, okay, so let's go through it. And so you're lying, you're dreaming, and then the person comes in the room, and then how can we change the ending of the movie of the dream of the movie? Generally, not in a violent way, like, so I took out a knife, and I cut their.. I decapitated them. We don't want to say that, but you say the person comes in, and then you said, "Oh my gosh, oh, it's the mailman, and he is delivering the mail, and he got confused between the night and the morning, and so we have to say, "mr. Mailman, you're coming in my room. Deliver the mail, you gotta wait until 8o'clock and so you can play with it in that way, storytelling and being imaginative with that. Now, of course, that's not going to work with a 16 year old, so, but you can even with an older kid, with a teenager, you can have them do that. So, so just spend some time before you go to sleep, sort of going through the dream, and then changing the ending in however way you want to change it. Run through that in your head a few times, and then see what happens. But you shouldn't freak out if your kid is having nightmares every once in a while. That's just a normal thing, and so we want to normalize that. If it's recurrent, try that and see what happens, because it generally does pretty good things. Yeah, I think that's wonderful. And I'll, I'll tell my kids when they have nightmares, I'll tell them to picture their favorite place to be, like, we'll play it out before bed. Oh, you really like going to the beach? Okay, well, let's have that. You're in control of your, of your dream, believe it or not. And why don't let's think about how it would look if we ended up at the beach at the end of the nightmare. Yeah, just what you're saying. Yep, exactly. Control, that's right. And I think the thing we have to remember with kids is that they're very suggestible, and so the language that we use about it, the way we talk about it, is really, really great. So you just saying to your kids, you know, you're in control of your dream, they're like, oh, well, that's an interesting concept, and so when you, when you start giving kids that language and start talking about it in that way, instead of saying, like, oh my god, what does this nightmare mean, why are you having this nightmare? Oh, right, there's that catastrophic language. So, so being able to play around with kids' imaginations and tell stories, and there are kids I've had that have sleep difficulties, and I record things. We tell a story, I'll record it, and then they listen to it at night before they go to bed, so that it helps them go through a different scenario. Really, we just have to take advantage of kids' imaginations, because you know they're a blessing and a curse, right? Our imagination is what gets worry going, but if we can start talking about using it in a positive way, then it's really pretty cool. Yeah, absolutely. No, you're so lovely to listen to. I think the big takeaways you are. No, I think I think it's really a lot of food for thought, just the role that we as parents can play influencing our kids for the better. Our words are really powerful, and language is really powerful, and our reactions are so powerful, and they're watching us all the time. Yeah, I always say little kids with big ears, that's right, that's why I do that thing, where I do, you know, like if I, if I, when my kids were little, they're not little anymore, if I wanted them to hear something, I would do, like the stage whisper to my husband, because if I said, like, you know what, you did such a great job today being nice to your brother, I'm so, I'm so glad how you guys got along. Okay, say they're hearing, like, oh, thanks, Mom, but if they were playing Legos, and I went in the other room, and I was talking to my husband about it in a way that I pretended I didn't want them to hear, oh my gosh, right? They just.. then I would walk into the room, and they'd be like smiling, you know? I'd be like,"Oh, you wouldn't believe.. like I didn't want to tell them this. But I mean, I was like, totally, totally impressed by the way they dealt with each other today. It was just fantastic. I wish you could have seen it. And then they're like, "Aren't we great? Yeah, I used to do that all the time, that's a great tip. I think we all like knowing secrets, right? Yeah. Oh, they love secrets. Yeah, as soon as you drop your voice, I mean, my family says that I'm nosy. I prefer the term curious, but when I was little, if my parents dropped their voice, that was something I wanted to hear, right? That's when they were talking about the good stuff, so you can, you could manipulate that a little bit with your kids. We all like to eavesdrop, whether, whether you get it or not, some of us more than others, apparently. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, I want to tell you, I heard about you because one of my patients just adores you, adores your podcast. You've made a true difference in her life, and so she turned me onto your podcast, and so I really, really appreciate all the advice and all the difference you've made for so many. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah, and we have fun doing it. I hope that comes across. You know what, honestly, that's that's what I really pick up on about you is that you, you talk about it in a very light way. Yeah, and I think I think when we, if we could all lighten things a little bit in our lives, it would make things a lot better. Yeah, there is a thank you. There's a family therapist, he's, he's no longer alive, but Jay Haley, he was just like a seminal figure in family therapy, and he, one of his quotes was that we can address the serious problems of our clients recognizing that they're serious, but in the spirit of play, and I think that really resonated me when I was new to this, and figuring out how I was going to use my personality. It was wonderful that Jay Haley gave me permission to put humor in play and connection. Because I think that humor is so connecting, I just think we have to make sure that we do that with our kids. It's a very beautifully said. I really appreciate your perspective, and I'm so appreciative of your time. Thank you. Oh, it was my pleasure. I'm so glad that we got to do this. Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Your Child is Normal. Also, if you could take a moment and leave a five-star review wherever it is you listen to podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. It really makes a difference to help this podcast grow.