You're listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world. As always,

we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilkes.

Hey, everyone. We're interrupting our normal content schedule to talk about something that we believe is urgent.

On today's episode, we're discussing parenting teens when scary things happen.

Currently, it's the COVID-19.

I know that a lot of my friends, family, my kids, we're all having a lot of anxiety about our health,

maybe finances and changes that go on with our jobs, missed opportunities, future plans.

The kids' education is changing.

We're moving to home for a while.

So I can totally see how this episode is going to be helpful to a lot of families

that are dealing with the same thing right now. I don't think that there is anyone in the United

States that isn't facing some sort of cancellation of plans. Like you said, Jessica, I missed

opportunities from this. I feel like across the board in the United States, we're all being faced with this.

And so, Dr. Ken, if we could just start with the parents for a second, and how do we deal with this anxiety in our own selves?

So at the risk of repeating myself or being annoying, I am a Christian psychologist. And so, you know, you can't talk about scary things without talking about faith, because these are exactly the times as parents that are Christian, we should be different. Now, I don't mean that we should, you know, feel bad if we don't. I get afraid of things as much as anybody else.

But as I always say, the Lord will forgive you for the things you're afraid of, but don't be proud of it.

He's given us enough to actually not fear.

And you should really start with your own self.

You cannot give what you don't have.

So if you're going to try to bring peace to your children

and you are flipping out, you're going to end up just sounding silly, yelling at your children to

...