Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to the questions and answers edition of Thriving Kids, a podcast from the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children with mental health and learning disorders. I'm Dr. Dave Anderson, clinical psychologist and your host. Last week, we had an enlightening conversation with neurosurgeon Dr. Brian Heflinger about a range of topics, from what happens to our brains when we die, or at least what might happen. I don't think we settled that question. Childhood anxiety, familiar familial loss. And Dr. Heflinger opened up to share how his focus on neurosurgery came as a result of the loss of his brother, and also how he overcame his own childhood social anxiety to be able to speak publicly, to be able to train doctors, and also to be able to speak about his own experience with the loss of one of his sons. Today in this questions and answers podcast edition, we have eight questions from our community about those topics and more. So let's get into it. So our first question of this week's Thriving Kids podcast. Q and A. What can parents learn from doctors about staying steady in a crisis, even when the situation feels overwhelming? And I want to say that I believe this question was submitted by a listener who was listening to me talk to a neurosurgeon, and that they might mean at some level like that kind of doctor, because I'm the Ph.D. kind of doctor, but I'm, like, not doing surgery kind of doctor. And I want to say that one of the things that I was really impressed with in Dr. Heflinger's podcast episode was just the level of focus that is required at his level of work in the sense that, you know, we're doing. He's talking about hours of surgery with multiple stages, staying focused at the most microscopic level in order to, you know, help a patient. And for someone who was then juxtaposing that on their own struggles with anxiety over the course of their lifetime was really amazing. Just look at kind of where that pops up and where it doesn't. And I think that if we go back to some of the things that Dr. Heflinger said, that's kind of coming from the mental health side of the field. It's that whenever there's a crisis or whenever it's something that is real, like, that should get us, our juices flowing, our adrenaline going, something like that. If we're talking about how to stay calm, you know, focus first is on impulse control. This is what we as psychologists would talk about all the time. It's that, you know, whatever you might think, think first to do oftentimes is wrong. Like, I was talking to my kids recently on a spring break trip to Tennessee about what to do with bears. And, you know, we were talking about this kind of old phrase that, like, you know, if it's brown, lay down. If it's black, attack. If it's, you know, white, good night. And the reason why we were talking about that phrase for bears is that there might be an instinct you have around bears, but for different kinds of bears you encounter, there's actually something you should do to deal with that kind of crisis. So first thing is, okay, let's try. And this is like what we think of when we do medical training for people, when we think of when we do emergency care, when we think of when we're talking about dealing with crises. Let's take what your first impulse is. Let's train your brain in sort of imaginal exposure about what you do in that situation. Same thing we use with teenagers when we're asking them about stressful or risky situations they'd encounter in adolescence. Let's think about what you do in that situation. And, you know, let's kind of practice that or rehearse that beforehand. This is like, for example, same thing when we train people to be, say, wilderness emergency medical responders or emergency medical responders in general. You know, you're training people to say, okay, even before I start doing CPR or I start doing something with this particular person, I'm going to designate someone and say, call 911. Like, if I suddenly was seeing someone of medical crisis at the Child Mind Institute, I'd be like, Chad, who's. Who's our illustrious producer here on thriving kids call 911. And then I'd be helping that person. So the first thing is impulse control. Second thing is, is there training or rehearsal that helps us in this situation? And then third thing is like, okay, how can I make it so that my decisions are perhaps based on considering a number of options versus going with the first one. That occurs to me as I'm in a crisis. And that might mean either being able to settle some of your emotions or. Or just being able to ride them out. So people who practice distress tolerance, where they can say, like, I know this is a stressful emotion. It's not going to kill me. I can kind of ride out this feeling of anxiety or this feeling of unease or, you know, this feeling like there's, you know, danger. And just kind of think like, okay, what can I think about that'll help me to do the right thing in this particular crisis. I'll just give one last thing that I highlight is like, there's also a lot of this that goes into working with your kids. Like I say to our kids, you know, if you get lost in a large public place, you know, for example, you know, you're separated from us, you're wondering what to do. Part of that mental rehearsal for them is, I want you to take a deep breath and I want you to find someone with kids and ask them to help you find your parent. Like, and that might be one little piece where if we rehearse that mentally, the kid is more likely to think of that in the moment. And. And then even if it's a crisis they've never encountered before, they're going to remember that there was something like that even with a similar thing, and they might apply that same learning. So all this is to say, if I was to break it down, rehearsal beforehand. But if you don't have time to rehearse, talk about thinking about how you ride the wave of your impulses and emotions, consider your options and try to choose the safest one. That's how you can kind of stay cool in this crisis. So our second question on this thriving kids podcast. Q and A. How do I know when my child's anxiety is something they might grow through versus something they need real support for? This is a question we often get from parents. Because childhood anxiety is normal, we expect kids to be anxious, going into new situations, meeting new peer groups, starting a new school, starting a new extracurricular activity, maybe at night because it's dark or they're afraid of monsters or they saw something on tv. Obviously, having anxiety is a typical emotional experience. What we worry about are a few phenomena that happen with kids who have more significant anxiety. So part of this is that, and many of you who've listened to previous podcast episodes have heard me mention this acronym. It's fidi F I D I. Frequency, Intensity, Duration, and Impairment. If we're talking about a kid's anxiety, I'll often say to parents, one of the ways to kind of check in with yourself about whether or not this level of anxiety is something you might need extra support is how frequently it's happening, how intense it is when it happens, how long it's been happening, and also whether or not it stops that kid from doing things that they otherwise might enjoy or that are really important developmental tasks, say, within your home, at school, in activities with friends, or getting the sleep they need. And for A lot of parents, it helps also to know, kind of like, what are the typical categories of anxiety that we'd get support with? So it might be separating from caregivers. It might be a specific fear of a single thing. It might be a lot of anxiety in social situations or feeling like you can't talk or approach peers, or especially at younger ages. One particular form of social anxiety can be selective mutism, where a kid is not speaking. In situations where they're not comfortable outside the home with peers or with teachers or to folks in restaurants, we might be asking about things like, do kids have obsessional thinking about their worries? Are they worried about real life things all day long, every day? Their tests, whether or not they're on time with things, whether or not the schedule is going to work, that kind of thing? Or are they worried about things that might not be as close to real life? Are they just really worried about things that might occur to them as intrusive thoughts and whether or not that might increase the chance of harm coming to people or other things happening? Do they do certain things that seem to be driven by anxiety? Like they engage in certain rituals over and over that they say, you know, settle their own anxiety? Are they very nervous at night or to be by themselves? You know, are they extremely nervous about a particular thing happening? Is some of their nervousness coming from a particularly disturbing event they've had early in their life? All of those are questions we might ask during a diagnostic interview where we might say, okay, if a parent reports that kind of anxiety and it seems frequent or intense, or it's been happening for a long time, and. And it might be impairing the kid, their functioning. That might be something that you need real support for. The last thing I'll say about that, though, is that we wish that anxiety and mental health wasn't so stigmatized in our society that people wanted to wait until it was really bad to see someone. We want this to be something where, if we can, and we realize this is a tall order for a lot of communities, we'd love for people to speak to someone sooner rather than later, even if it's a level of anxiety that you don't think is really impairing that kid's functioning, we have strategies to help, the same strategies that we would help kids with, to help them be brave, to help them be able to kind of manage their own emotions or at least kind of ride out their emotions. These are strategies that work for every single kid, whether they have clinically relevant anxiety or not, and just to give you a free resource that we've included in our show notes before and we'll include here again. We've created a free curriculum of emotion management skills that we teach kids in the first few sessions of therapy for anxiety or for sadness or for difficulty dealing with events in their life. Those skills are all available to be taught free of charge through kid Facing resources that we've created through the Thriving Kids projects and our mental health fitness initiatives that are available for free on our website. And you can just go and watch these videos. They're actually also created for each age group, pre K, elementary, middle and high school, where you can watch the set of videos and look at the written resources for your age range and access them for free on our website, created in partnership with the states of California and Ohio. So please access those resources if you're thinking, hey, look, I might not have access to a provider, it might be too early, but I'd love for my kid to get some skills to deal with when they might be feeling anxious. Question number three on our Thriving Kids podcast Q and A if I struggled with anxiety or panic as a kid, how can I avoid passing that fear on to my own children? This is a great question because, you know, one of the things that I may not have gone into as much detail in the previous question about is one of the things we also do ask in an intake interview with, say, a kid who might be suffering with anxiety is also does anxiety kind of come out of nowhere? Do you feel like it comes as an attack? Do you suddenly feel like you can't breathe? Do you suddenly feel your heart racing? Like we'll ask about some of those physical symptoms. And what I think adults should know is that of course mental health concerns often run in families. These are things where we don't necessarily say that mental health disorders are genetically caused. We don't necessarily say they're environmentally caused. They're often a combination of both. And for those of you who are real fans of the science, you know, there's also the field of epigenetics where we can get into the idea that actually your environment might cause different of your genes to be expressed based on which stressors or supports are in your environment. So there's all kinds of interesting things to look at in the gene, environment, interplay. So that's where I say to parents, you might have passed on some genetic vulnerability to anxiety in your child. Lord knows I think that folks have heard me talk about this in other spaces. I suffered from anxiety as a kid. I had OCD as a child and even as an adult, I still struggle with generalized anxiety and I still get real symptoms of panic on planes, even though I've got pretty good treatment for that. And my therapist and I work on some strategies for that as well. But, you know, when I think about what I might have passed on to my own children, my nine and my six year old, you know, we know that there's some genetic loading, but we also know that with every generation, we can arrange the environment, we can teach certain skills that come from the science that maybe help give our kids tools that not necessarily we wouldn't have had. I think my parents really tried to support me and teach me those skills as well. But more that, like, we can give them those skills at the right developmental moment to perhaps help them to confront their own anxiety or be even more brave. So in that sense, if I was to go to kind of the biggest recommendations for parents, it's if you worry that your kid might be prone to anxiety, first and foremost, go back to the resources I just recommended in the last question that teach emotion regulation management, you know, skills through our kind of free resources or through free resources you might find on this elsewhere or in curricula that are in use in your kid's school. So, you know, in that sense, kids who can identify their feelings, talk about their feelings and have some strategies to cope with, be mindful of or ride out their feelings, tend to fare better with any anxiety that might already be passed on genetically. And then beyond that, it's important. And this is where we would cite Eli Leibovitz up at Yale. He and his colleagues who've worked on developing the intervention called Space, where there's a lot in that intervention about what we call parental accommodation. It's this notion that when a kid gets anxious, you think, well, I want to remove that anxiety. I want to help them feel comfortable. And that's a perfectly acceptable parental response. But when we are doing that, especially with a kid prone to anxiety, we may be more and more likely to reinforce that anxiety if we keep that cycle of accommodation going. As one example, it could be, you know, a kid is really nervous to go to birthday parties or social events with their friends where they don't know exactly what's going to happen or they don't know certain friends. And so a parent might think, first time, you know, like, okay, my kid's really nervous to go to this party. I'm gonna let them stay home and do other things today. But then if it becomes a pattern where for a long time. The kid is just not going to these events such that they stop being invited, stop attending these things that are a developmentally kind of relevant event, and don't have tools to manage their anxiety in that moment. That's where that accommodation actually does them a disservice. We're removing that discomfort. We're not helping the kid to get comfortable being uncomfortable, and we're making it so that the anxiety is actually that much more powerful. So the more that we can think about how do we give kids skills to be brave and how do we help reinforce them for that bravery, the more likely they are to triumph over even anxiety they might have gotten through. Family Means okay, our fourth question on our thriving Kids podcast, Q and A What should parents know about helping kids face fears gradually instead of letting avoidance take over? This is a great lead in from the last question. When we do therapy with kids who are anxious about certain things, oftentimes the approach is something that you can Google or engage with your favorite AI about understanding, but it's called exposure and response prevention. You can also find articles about this on our website, childmind.org but what exposure and response prevention is, is it's saying, okay, if you have a particular fear, you can gradually expose yourself to that fear. And over time, what you will find is that as you expose yourself to that fear, your anxiety and stress at that fear actually lessens. And either that or you get more comfortable being uncomfortable in that situation. So you can kind of accept that that fear is there, but it's not as scary anymore. And to give you kind of an example, you know, specific phobias are the easiest way that we can highlight what an exposure hierarchy looks like. Like, let's say someone is afraid of snakes. Now, they might say to us, I avoid lots of situations. I try not to live in places or visit places that are really hot climates where snakes might be out. You know, I try not to go hiking in the wilderness. I don't like looking at pictures of snakes. I try to, you know, not visit people's houses where they have snakes for pets. And we say, okay, you know, how much is this impairing your life? Now, granted, that's definitely a phobia, but sometimes people have specific phobias and they don't encounter snakes all that often. So it may not be that impairing. But maybe someone says, well, I want to be able to go hiking with my family, and we're about to visit this. You know, maybe they're going to visit the American Southwest and we Want to, you know, do some hikes in that area, Arizona or New Mexico. But, you know, I'm really scared I'm going to encounter a snake. And we'd say, we can help you. So what we're going to do is we're going to create a ladder. I'm going to list a ton of different situations, and then we're going to look at how anxious each one makes you. And then we're going to proceed from the low end of the ladder to the top end of the ladder. So what does looking at pictures of snakes look like? What about looking at videos of snakes? What if we got an app and we learn more about snakes? What if we get toys that look like snakes? Then we get some really more realistic toys that look like snakes, and maybe a remote control and crawl along the ground. And then we get to the point where maybe we visit someone's house where they have a pet snake. And then finally we get to this last stage of exposure where the. Maybe you go hiking in a place where there are snakes. Now, the person might say, well, look, isn't the objective of this for me to feel calm around snakes? And we say, absolutely not. Most fears don't work like that. The point is for your body to recognize that there are moments when your alarm bell is going off and it's right. Maybe you're in the middle of the street and a car is bearing down on you. You gotta get out of there. That's for your safety. Alarm bell, good. But you're going on a hike with your family. You want to enjoy yourself. You want to enjoy the weather. And you're so scared you might encounter a snake at some point along the way that you can't, you know, stay calm. You can't be present in the conversation. You can't enjoy the nature. That's where we want you to get, you know, to a point where you can ride that wave, you can ride that discomfort, and it may not mean you're comfortable. Now, I'm speaking from personal experience here because many of you heard me earlier in the podcast mention the fact that I have, since, you know, my early. I'd say late teens, early 20s, been quite fearful when I'm on planes. It's a big loss of control and things like that. It makes me, you know, very nervous. But at some level, I'm not necessarily going to be comfortable on it. I've. I've accepted that. I've done my exposures. I've watched videos of planes. I've watched planes fly overhead. I'VE watched lots of landings. Whenever I do get the privilege of visiting the airport, I have read about planes. I've read about their safety. I know cognitively that I am more safe in the plane than I am in the car on the way to the airport. But at the same time, even after all those exposures, I'm still not at a point where I would say I'm fully comfortable, but I'm at a point where I can say to myself, I know that this discomfort is a false alarm bell. I don't have to do anything about it. I'm just going to sit here on the plane and watch whichever trashy reality show or fantastic science fiction movie or Game of Thrones offshoot I really want to watch while I'm on this plane. And. And I'm just going to choose to have the experience that way. All this to say these kinds of hierarchies can be exposed, can be applied, these kind of exposure hierarchies to almost any fear. And oftentimes we say to parents is, we create this thing. We create a plan to kind of reinforce a kid for their bravery. And if they're not making jumps on the steps in the hierarchy, we try to make those steps even smaller and then reinforce their progress on these even more incremental steps in facing their fears. We can make it so that whatever people are afraid of through this process, they have trusted people alongside them to support them. They have ways of either coping with those emotions or riding them out. And we can get to a point where those fears don't dominate our lives. Now for our fifth question in the thriving Kids podcast Q and A. We're coming over, you know, the hump into the back half of the podcast episode here. As a parent, how do I balance encouraging reasonable risk, climbing, biking, trying hard things with keeping my child physically safe? This is a great question, because what a lot of parents are getting as messaging is, you know, you want to support your child in constructive risk taking. We want kids to build up resilience and grit and persistence and growth, mindset. And all these different concepts that we talk about in this podcast and that, of course, are talked about in all the parenting zeitgeists all over the Internet. And parents will say, well, what does that look like in practice? And the answer oftentimes is that what you're doing is you're taking first a look at challenges and you're saying, what is kind of the Goldilocks level of challenge for my kid? I don't want a level of challenge that makes Them emotionally distraught, where they're so scared or emotionally stressed that they really can't think straight. I don't want a challenge that's like so easy for them that they don't build up like that muscle of persistence. I want something in kind of this middle range where I can say, okay, they're challenged, but it's not beyond their level of capability. And we're searching for those challenges to support them. Then when the kid says, look, this is a really hard challenge, what I say to parents, and this is drawing on the research of, you know, folks across the country like Julia Leonard at Yale and Angela Duckworth and others. It's about framing. How can we frame this as a learning experience and say to a kid, I want to support you in this particular thing. This is a learning experience. We don't have to be amazing at it. We don't have to be amazing at hard things right off the bat. It's in the trying. That's really where we can facilitate our own kind of like, grit in saying, let's put in our effort into this situation, see what comes out. And when we talk about activities like climbing or biking, of course there's some non negotiables in biking. And this is where, as many of you may know, previous podcast guests, Dr. Dylan G. And also my wife and. And also a neuroscientist. Protecting brains is absolutely paramount, even when engaging constructive risk taking and trying to facilitate persistence. So obviously there's some non negotiables. If you're riding in a car, you're wearing a seatbelt. If you're riding a bike, you've got a helmet on. If you're gonna be climbing, you have a rope. There is no reason why your kid needs to be doing free solo type stuff like in documentaries, unless they are a professional and at some level, they have kissed goodbye to this earth. So we really do want to keep our kids physically safe. And then at the same time, we want to say, if we've established that baseline of safety, here's where I can stay one step behind you. We can face this challenge together. If your kid really has no idea to face it, we try to kind of push into problem solving. Well, let's generate some solutions, see what we can come up with, and then try something and come back. If they face that challenge before but they're just not remembering their success, this is the moment when we coach them, which we say, look, I'm going to remind you, you were successful in this last time. This is the first small step of this task, this time, and I have optimism for your ability to kind of do this particular thing. And then you say, we're going to stay here. I'll give one more example of this. This past winter, we had the privilege of taking our 6 year old to learn how to ski on a bunny hill with some friends who helped us to kind of get access to some skiing for the weekend. And my daughter had never skied. I grew up not skiing because I grew up in the South. I grew up in Atlanta. And I don't really know what the process of teaching a kid to ski is, but she got out on the ski hill and she said, this is cold. My wife and I had paid 150 bucks to rent the skis. We were not going inside. After three minutes, we were going to at least try this. And I said to my daughter, I understand this is cold. And it was hard. This is a learning experience. Can we just go up and down the bunny hill ten times? That's it. If you hate it after that, we'll go back inside. But I'm just trying to look. I'm like, okay, where's her Goldilocks level of challenge? How can I give her a little bit of a challenge that shows her that she can try some hard things? But it's not so much that we're gonna melt down on this hill and have a really tough rest of the day? And she went up and down 10 times, and by the end of those 10 times, she did not leave the bunny hill for the next two hours while she learned how to ski. That's where we want to coach our kids through, is just a little bit of that moment where we say, where do I think they're capable? Where's this Goldilocks level? And how can I stay one step behind them saying, let's do this together. Let's try this thing? We don't have to be Peekaboo street right off the bat, but we can just start learning how to ski. Our sixth question on the thriving kids podcast Q and A. And I just got our producer Chad to laugh with the Peekaboo street reference, because I really like that. I mean, you know, I was gonna. I was thinking more contemporary with Lindsey Vonn a little bit, but, you know, we got a lot of great skiers. Okay, what are the basic health habits that matter most for parents? Brains and bodies, especially when life is busy and stressful? This is a great question because the answer is just the obvious. And the hard part is this is one of the hardest things for parents to give themselves space around. When we talk about basic health habits or when we talk about the episode we did earlier in the Thriving Kids podcast lineup with Dr. Jenny Louie about filling your cup and parental wellness and coping and things like that, where if we talk about basic health habits, if I can get a parent a little bit more sleep, if I can get a parent a little bit more opportunity to move their body or to engage in some weight training, which is predictive of longevity, you know, lifting something, if I can get a parent to think about a couple changes to a diet that make them feel like they're putting more healthy fuel into their body, if I can get a parent to hydrate just a little bit better, those things at baseline are an immense help to our wellness, to our brains and bodies, and to our ability to show up for our kids. Now, if somebody said, okay, okay, I hear those things, but what about right after that? My answer is, all I would look for is little windows that a parent can take for some level of social support. And I would also look for something that parent can do that they find to be a break for themselves. It can be as small as just trying to have a mindful cup of tea or coffee in the morning. It can be, you know, some activity that they find to be de stressing or relaxing. It can be just trying to take a shower where you're not disturbed for the entire time that you're in the shower, for those eight to 10 minutes, even that you're taking a shower, whatever that is. It's like if we can find a couple little activating activities that boost our mood, you, even in small doses, a little bit of social support and those basic wellness activities, that's something that has a much larger butterfly effect than we even think when we're just kind of discussing them in the abstract. So I'll give you that. Our seventh question for our Thriving Kids Podcast Q and A How can parents talk to kids about grief, loss or scary medical events without overwhelming them? We have a number of articles about this on our website, childmind.org, we also have trauma and grief guides talking about how to talk to kids of different age ranges about different disturbing events or scary events or events of loss that they might experience in their lives. There's a lot of guidance out there on these things for us and also in a number of our organizational partners. But what I will say at the most basic level, kids do better when they're not in the dark. So what I go through with parents so often is just a three Step process. Let's get a couple sentences that share the information you need to with the kid at a developmentally appropriate level. Let's then leave space for them to ask questions or have their reactions. And then let's validate that whatever emotion they might have, whatever questions they might have asked, we're so glad that they're able to share that with us. Or if they're not able to speak or don't have a reaction, just leaving that door open and maintaining that this is not the only conversation we have to have about this. And over and over, if parents deal with difficult events in that way, their kids are going to see them as a bedrock of managing their own emotions and kind of coping with what's going on with this. The other question I'll say we get with that because we have a few other thriving kids podcast episodes that relate to this particular topic of talking to kids about scary things is just that it is okay for kids to see your emotions. If you're experiencing loss and you're sad and you're crying, labeling that and letting your kid know that it's okay for them to feel those things, to borrow a phrase from our friend of the podcast, Mark Brackett, you can give them permission to feel in that way. If you are, you know, scared by an event that's happened, it's okay to say that that event is scary when those scary events happen. An additional talking point is that we often want to tell kids what we're doing to help them to feel safe or to maintain their safety. That can also help them feel like they can process their feelings while we're trying to keep them safe. But it's something where, you know, we want to talk. Just, we want to make sure we talk. And a lot of parents will say, well, I need to make sure I say the right thing. And if you might have noticed in this answer, it's not so much about saying the right thing, it's about having a framework that hits on those major points. And then what your implicit messaging is to your kid is, I'm trying. I'm trying to give you the information you need. I'm trying to make space for your feelings and your reactions. And I'm trying to let you know there's an open line of communication here. And at some level, I'm trying to show you that the feelings that I have could be feelings that you have and it's okay to feel them and to talk about them. All of those things predict incredible things for both the parent, child, relationship and for A child's emotional development over time. Our last question of the Thriving Kids podcast Q and A episode this week. What does everything in moderation really look like for parents who are trying to be healthy but don't want wellness to become a larger source of guilt? So this relates to the question we just answered a couple questions ago, because we've mentioned this in a couple different podcasts. We have an upcoming podcast, we talk about this a bit with Dr. Eliza Pressman. Dr. Lisa Damore has talked to us a little bit about this. You know, we've had. We've had this come up a number of times where we find that parents across the kind of parentisphere, and, you know, a lot of things they see online get these extreme perspectives, like this notion of, like, you must make sure your child avoids this thing or else it is, you know, terrible for their health. Or, you know, again, parents will feel like they get messages about themselves where it's this idea that, like, if they don't martyr themselves and sacrifice everything for their kids, you know, don't care for themselves at all, then they're not doing a good job at the end of the day. This is where so much in the world of parenting is us trying to help people navigate the word balance or everything in moderation. It's saying, look, we want you to show up for your kids. We want you to be there for their feelings, just like we're talking about in the previous answer. But also, the only way you show up for them is if at some level, you care for yourself. If at some level you're getting sleep and you're fueling your body and you're making sure that you're doing the things that you need to do such that your body can be at some degree of health. The reality is our kids want us to be there for them now, and. And they want us to be there for them in the future. And so we're playing a long game here. We're running a marathon, not a sprint. And what that means is, like, if you look at people running a sprint, yeah, you might be able to run a sprint while a little bit dehydrated. You might be able to run a sprint while not having exactly the right gear. But if you're running a marathon without the right gear or without hydration stations at each of the 26 miles, you're going to have a bad time. And this is where we want parents to say to themselves, okay, if I find myself thinking extreme way, then this is where you want to think. Like, is it all or nothing. Am I sitting here going like I must do this and it must only be this and I got to get if you're raising kids with a partner, they also have to know this. This is where I'd say to parents, is there more of a middle path here? Is it possible that you know what your kid needs? More so than this latest thing that you've become hyper fixated on is what we know to be the major drivers of child development. Parents. Parents who are emotionally available. Parents who want to build a relationship with you. Parents who lead with nurture and set boundaries when needed. Parents who support family connections and time together. Parents who support kids in their engagement with academics and try to help them with their homework. Parents who get kids into hobbies and try to get them into activities. Parents who try to get their kids enough rest and parents who care for themselves so they can do all of that again tomorrow. Also, all of that is so incredibly important. So that's where we get this kind of idea of how we balance all these things in moderation so we can play the long game through to adulthood. With that, let me just say thank you for listening to this episode of the Thriving Kids Podcast. For more tools and support, please visit childmind.org resources home to our Family Resource center, where you can explore resources and how to identify and learn more about anxiety, panic, kids who might encounter some scary news, and any of the other answers that we've talked about over the course of this podcast episode. These resources sit alongside all kinds of other resources for childhood anxiety and for ways of coping with stressful life events. Thanks again for tuning in and see you next week.