Can You Help Your Kid’s Anxiety By Changing Your Behavior?

Death, Sex & Money

Slate Podcasts

Business, Health & Fitness, Society & Culture, Careers, Relationships, Sexuality

4.6 • 7.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kids look to their parents to keep them safe and to show them how much risk they can handle, but parents are often winging it as they walk that line. In this episode, Anna talks to Alexis, a parent of an 8 year-old with an anxiety disorder, about how she learned to adjust her parenting through a parent-focused therapy program directed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz, author of Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents, who also talks to Anna about his approach.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	One message that I would want any parent of an anxious child to know is that in all of mental health and all of psychiatry and psychology, there is no problem more treatable than anxiety.
0:19.0	This is Death, Sex, and Money.
0:24.0	The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot.
0:30.0	I need to talk about more. I'm Anna Sales.
0:40.0	One in 11, American children in adolescence has an anxiety disorder, a number that's been increasing over the last 20 years.
0:48.0	We heard about this in our recent Colin series about mental health called Hold On.
0:53.0	I have two young kids and I also hear about this in conversations with other parents in disrupted family routines, battles over going to school or access to social media.
1:05.0	Many of us are questioning how to support our kids through their fears while also pushing them when they need it.
1:13.0	I was riffing on some version of that with some neighbors on my deck in Berkeley a few months back.
1:19.0	One of them, Mike Muraski, described growing up in the 70s in Montana. He was not hovered over as a kid, which suited his personality.
1:28.0	He's always had a healthy skepticism of authority. He moved to the Bay Area initially with his punk band. And before that, they were skateboarding.
1:37.0	I remember literally the first time I stepped on a skateboard. I went down a hill and fell and scraped both my knees and my elbows and I was like a real wipe out.
1:46.0	Literally the first time. And then just jumped up and was like, fuck yeah, I got to do that again.
1:53.0	Where were your parents?
1:56.0	I would say nowhere nearby, but they were really supportive.
2:03.0	When they would drive us to skateboard contests, which in Montana is not a small undertaking.
2:10.0	They would've been a long drive. But that behavior penchance for risk started way, way younger.
2:18.0	Like there was, I get jumped on my bike and bike away and go wherever for the day. And they had no idea where I was.
2:27.0	My parents were a little more extreme in that regard in that my dad was a research psychologist.
2:36.0	at Montana State University and really believed in what he called natural consequences, right?
2:43.5	That sort of learning, where you learn by doing.
2:48.1	Interesting. So he had an intellectual framework for letting you figure stuff out on your own.
	...

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