Welcome back to Feeding the Mouth to Bight You, a weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

I'm Cynthia Yanov, and as always, I'm joined by psychologist and author Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, hey, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, hey, Dr. Ken.

How are you?

Cynthia, is this your first, did you just wake up and now you're doing this? You haven't done anything today, have you? I don't do anything all day. I just kind of hang out and wait for these. What have you done today? Mm-hmm. A couple, couple, couple podcasts. Couple podcasts. Yes, and man, you're a busy girl.

No.

Here's the thing, though.

Here's what I'd like to know we're going to talk about self-esteem today and i've decided well first of all i think you and i

probably both have a fine self-esteem because we both think we're right on any given topic

if given this one which we're going to laugh about in a minute but did you grow up like

if you look back on your life would you say you grew up with um a healthy self-esteem or not so much

i think i grew up with an average self-esteem which included uh and we'll talk about this which

included periods of time that i felt horrible horrible seventh grade really should be erased from most everyone's life.

I mean, just there are points.

No, but in essence, I had insecurity about different things.

Almost a moving target, really.

Like, what is he feeling incredibly insecure about now?

But five years ago, I wasn't, you know, so it's,

it's a moving thing. Yeah, yeah. I was thinking out that for me, and I would say,

same. I would say probably an average self-esteem. In some areas, I think it was higher,

and in some areas, it's lower. I was never athletic, so always, you know, had like a bit of a... Wilkes says are the same way. We don't do athletic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, now it's terrible because I married someone very athletic and our kids are athletic. And then they're just mean about it, you know. You're living with these giants. Yeah, well, they would miss a ball like in a game or something. They were like, oh, mom's jeans kicked in. I'm like, hey, thanks. Okay. I'm sitting here, everybody. I can hear you. Well, I'm excited to talk about this because, and you and I were already starting to argue even before the podcast started. We're barely friends now. Let's talk in front of the children instead of alone. That's what he said as we are arguing about. He's like, we should be taping this argument. I was like, okay, good. No, we're not really arguing, but we were discussing this whole idea around self-esteem. And my guess would be that Dr. Ken would say having, and I don't know this yet, everyone, I'm guessing, but that he is going to say, eh, self-esteem overrated.

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