Flusterclux With Lynn Lyons: For Parents Who Worry

  Join the Flusterclux Facebook group so that you can ask your question on a future episode. The Anxiety Audit is available again only for the month of July so you can have a summer reset.  The Anxiety Audit, step by step, gives you signs, indicators, behaviors, and solutions to figuring out where your anxiety lives how to disrupt its process with practice. Join Us For Our Parenting Retreat this f...

Anxiety Expert Lynn Lyons offers some summer homework for anxious parents: stop giving your kids too much information. Learn what to do instead and why anxiety drives this habit. Join the Flusterclux Facebook group so that you can ask your question on a future episode. The Anxiety Audit will be available again for the month of July.  Stay tuned for more info! Join Us For Our Parenting Retreat this...

Summer’s here and parents are stressed. Hear Lynn talk about safety chatter, what it is, and why anxious parents do it. Our language matters so much. Lynn shares how to offer safety instructions to kids and teens that are practical and not catastrophic. Join the Flusterclux Facebook group so that you can ask your question on a future episode. Join Us For Our Parenting Retreat this fall! Get more i...

At the conclusion of Mental Health Awareness month, we weed through the bad advice that is so prevalent about anxiety that only makes it worse. We discuss the certain skills we must help our kids (and ourselves) develop to manage anxiety, and we talk about the things parents might try that have the desired outcome. This is an updated version of a previously released episode.  Join the Flusterclux...

In today’s episode Lynn answers two listener questions. First a mom discovers her 15 year old has been thinking of drinking to manage her stress. What are the conversations parents should be having with their teens around stress, substance abuse and peer pressure? And another mom raised by an anxious parent is trying to break the cycle with her daughters. She asks Lynn how to know when the voices...

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is often missed or just misunderstood. What is OCD and what isn’t? How does it differ from really anxious thoughts? How is it treated? While it can show up at any point in life, some kids commonly show signs around 7 when there’s a family history. Lynn explains the connection with anxiety and how it differs, but most importantly, how to manage it and what signs to loo...

So often the moms assume the role of supporting the family’s health and mental health, but dads have a critical role to play. What is that role? And how do you encourage your partner to step into that role? When a man is unsure of how to talk about emotions with his children, what should he say? What if he doesn’t want to talk about them with anyone? In this episode, we get raw and deep reflecting...

After an atypical year of intense togetherness with our kids, parents may be out of practice being apart from their kids. Today we talk about the separation anxiety parents feel around summer camp, because it really is harder on us that it is on them. How can we best prepare our own kids leaving home for somewhere new? How we can manage our worry when our kids are out of our sight? Why is it so im...

The Anxious Parent: Most families have one, some families have two. But what important role does a non-anxious parent play? How do worry and control often dictate parenting dynamics that put stress on a relationship? How can you tell if anxiety is in charge of your household, and what can you do about it? We mention two past episodes in this week's.  First we mention an episode called Romance and...

What’s the truth about phobias? Emetaphobia, Astraphobia, Autophobia. Some kids became afraid of a variety of things: throwing up, needles, dogs, thunderstorms, the dark. As parents we want to help, we want to make our kids feels safe and comfortable. We want to address the worry. But how we do that often just makes the worry and fear stronger. In this episode I ask Lynn to explain her effective a...

Do you or your child have Social Anxiety or are we now pathologizing ​shyness, too? Learn the different between real signs of social anxiety or just a more introverted temperament. What skills do we need to teach our kids to help them connect with others? As we leave our quarantined isolation, some kids might be feeling out of practice being with other kids and teens again. Hear Lynn tell us how t...

In honor of May 1st's deadline for many college bound seniors to make their choice, Lynn shares really relevant advice from her perspective over the last few decades of watching her adolescent clients to college and struggle with anxiety. Parents struggle knowing how to support academic success for their kids in a healthy way, so Lynn offers advice for parents of kids of all ages.  We also answer...

Panic Attacks. While they are incredibly common, they are often mislabeled and misunderstood. Teenagers, even adults, will casually throw the label around. What’s the difference between those really powerful moments of anxiety and a panic attack? How do you help your family members when they experience them? New episodes arrive Friday at 12:00AM EST. Join the email list to get news on the upcoming...

Mistakes and Failures can be some of life’s best teachers. When it comes to letting our kids fail, how do we know the difference between letting them fail and letting them drown? What do you do if your teenager hasn’t mastered the skill of asking for help? Or, what do you say when your teen doesn’t even care? New episodes arrive Friday at 12:00AM EST. Join the email list to get news on the upcomin...

At some point one of your children’s friends will be in crisis. How do you help your teens help their friends? How do you teach them to develop boundaries with those friends? When your child shares that a friend is feeling suicidal or cutting or other self-harming behaviors, what do you do? New episodes arrive Friday at 12:00AM EST. Join the email list to get news on the upcoming courses for paren...

Many families are feeling anxious about changes to their school routine, both kids and parents. How do we support our kids and teens and help them manage their worry about going back to school? And when does this worry become more serious and lead to school avoidance and school refusal? Lynn references Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents by Eli Lebow...

We talk a lot about the power of words...teaching kids to put words to their feelings, modeling emotional literacy. But the flip side of talking—the critical flip side—is listening. What happens when you don’t feel heard? What’s the toll on your mental health, royal or not? When our kids and teens talk, can we tap into the full power of listening? We discuss the way the public health conversation...

There's a lot of bad advice out there to weed through when so many claim to be parenting or anxiety experts. But some well-meaning advice will actually strengthen your child's anxious habits, and Lynn Lyons explains why.  Previous Episodes Mentioned: The Anxiety Vaccine Part 2: What Parents Can Do Right Now When a Family Experiences Trauma New episodes arrive Friday at 12:00AM EST. Don't Miss the...

All parents need this pep talk about managing COVID fatigue. And we recast a very popular episode. Anxiety shows up in the body—headaches, tummy troubles, and more. We talk about how understanding the mind body connection can help manage the physical symptoms of anxiety for you and your kids. New episodes arrive Friday at 12:00AM EST.  Don't Miss the Anxiety Audit for 2021! Break your 7 habits of...

Previous Episodes Mentioned: The Anxiety Vaccine Part 2: What Parents Can Do Right Now Extreme Shame and Self-Harm Unpacking Your Family’s Emotional Baggage and Starting Fresh With Your Kids   New episodes arrive Friday at 12:00AM EST.  Don't Miss the Anxiety Audit for 2021! Break your 7 habits of worry with Lynn. Purchase the self-paced course.  Register for the live Anxiety Audit workshop March...

Does parenting squash all romance? No, resentment does. This pandemic has disproportionately impacted mothers. It's putting our relationships to the test. So as we work to support our kids, there are traps we all fall into our our relationships. We talk about learning to ask for help in the right way, dropping that defensiveness, reducing that resentment, and how improving your co-parenting will h...

We end Season 2 with a bang of an episode. Finishing off our conversation about preventing anxiety in our kids, we tackle the toxicity of our achievement culture. It’s so normalized it’s invisible to us. And we answer a listener question about how to develop a strong work ethic in her 8 year old twins. Lynn has a must hear answer for kids of any age. New episodes arrive Friday at 12:00AM EST.  Don...

As we face a mental health crisis alongside the pandemic that we really focus on the emotional management skills that we can teach our children. It's an effective way to immunize them against emotional difficulties by talking about their emotions, raising their awareness of them, and parents modeling emotional literacy. Lynn discusses the commons trait that most anxious parents have in common in h...

While we wait for a vaccine distribution plan to address our global pandemic, there is a mental health crisis happening simultaneously. Our numbers for anxiety were alarming even before 2020, and now, yikes. But there ways parents can promote a skill-based immunization strategy for our family’s mental health. Is there really a vaccine for anxiety? We reference a webinar featuring Lynn Lyons with D...

Supporting Our Teens Teens are part of the age group hardest hit by the impact of the pandemic. Missing out on both the social development and high school's rituals, teens are losing motivation, sleep, and connection. Here's how to help them. We reference a past episode on election anxiety that has many relevant tips to process and talk about very stressful current events in a healthy way with you...