Can’t, Not Won’t: Rethinking Children’s Behaviour + Anxiety
Owning It: The Anxiety Podcast
Caroline Foran
4.4 • 654 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This one's for the parents. In this episode, I’m joined by Dr Naomi Fisher, a clinical psychologist and author known for her work on anxiety, trauma, demand avoidance and nervous-system-led parenting. I adored her books 'When the naughty step makes things worse' and 'A different way to learn'. We talk about why so many traditional parenting approaches — rewards, consequences, charts and pressure — can backfire for anxious and demand-avoidant children, and what it actually means when a child can’t do something, rather than won’t. Naomi explains how anxiety shows up as resistance, shutdown or control, why reducing demands can be regulating rather than permissive, and how parents can shift from power struggles to partnership. This is a deeply validating conversation for anyone parenting a child who experiences everyday life as overwhelming — and for parents who are tired of being told to try harder when things already feel hard enough.
Order yourself (or for a friend) a copy of my new book, Everything I Wish I'd Known About Anxiety: A Roadmap out of the Overwhelm and Back to Yourself here
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Subscribe to my weekly Substack here (not always anxiety related, often parenting related)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for listening to Owning It. If you would like to support the series, the best thing you can do is just tell a friend or better yet share it on social media. If you really, really want to support, you can subscribe to me on Substack where I write a weekly column. Listeners of the pod get a 20% discount forever at carolineforin.com. Thank you. |
| 0:20.1 | Hello and welcome back to Owning It the Anxiety podcast with me, Caroline Forin.substack.com. Thank you. Hello and welcome back to owning it the anxiety podcast with me, |
| 0:23.4 | Caroline Forin. This week my guest is world-renowned psychologist Dr. Naomi Fisher, who joins me for a |
| 0:29.1 | deep dive into childhood anxiety. It's particularly relevant to parents of anxious children, |
| 0:34.1 | especially where none of the traditional advice seems to make a difference, but also |
| 0:38.0 | for adults listening who can make better sense of their experiences growing up where anxiety may have |
| 0:42.8 | taken root. To learn more about how anxiety looked for me as a child, make sure to order my new book |
| 0:48.8 | everything I wish I'd known about anxiety with the link in the show notes. I hope this episode helps. |
| 0:55.8 | Naomi Fisher, I'm so thrilled to have you on my new series of owning it. Welcome and happy new year. Thank you for |
| 1:00.6 | inviting me and happy new year to you too. Your work is just incredible and I'm so happy for |
| 1:07.3 | personal reasons that I found it. For me, the shift away from fixing behaviours or |
| 1:13.7 | trying to eradicate anxiety towards a more compassionate understanding of our nervous system, |
| 1:20.0 | a nervous system logic has been honestly life changing for me in more than one way. I think first, |
| 1:26.4 | it's for me looking back at my own experience as a child and as a teenager |
| 1:31.2 | and understanding the anxiety that defined my existence. |
| 1:36.9 | It's always been a major feature of my life and it's the reason this podcast exists. |
| 1:41.0 | But also, specifically now it's a parent to an autistic little boy who fits the |
| 1:45.6 | PDA profile and he has the hardest time with his own experience of anxiety. |
| 1:50.7 | It's been an incredibly tough five years. |
| 1:53.6 | And when I discovered your books, it was honestly like a warm hug from someone who gets it. |
| 1:58.8 | I have never felt as validated or understood in any of the |
| 2:03.5 | literature I've come across. So first of all, thank you for that. Oh, thank you. It's lovely to be |
... |
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