Thank you for joining us for episode 427 of Live Happy Now. It's time to go back to school,

and for some kids, that means a whole lot of stress. I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week

I'm talking with Dr. Laura Phillips, the senior director in the Learning and Development Center

at the Child Mind Institute.

Laura specializes in working with children who have learning disorders, mood disorders, and anxiety, among other things.

And she's committed to improving the social, emotional well-being of children and adolescents,

so she's sitting down with me today to talk about how going back to school can create anxiety for kids of all ages and how it can also affect their parents.

Then she's going to tell us what we can do about it.

Let's have a listen.

Well, Laura, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you so much for having me.

I wanted to talk to you because back to school is on the minds of

everybody, kids, parents, shopkeepers. And we tend to, at this time of your focus on the

excitement of the new school year and all the great things. But there is a lot of research that

shows that children are more anxious than ever about going back to school. So I wanted to talk,

first of all, and find out what

you're seeing. So, I mean, this, I think children are more anxious than ever, unfortunately,

about everything. I think back to school is a transition, which tends to be anxiety provoking for

children, particularly those who experience anxiety. The last three years, each

transition back to school was anxiety provoking because kids didn't know what the year would look like

in the fall of 2020. We had kids who were doing full-time remote instruction, hybrid instruction.

Some kids were back in classrooms for the first time since the previous March. So that was

...