The Bad Mom Podcast: Parenting The Anxious Generation

My mom, Mirta Glyck, a retired New York City public school teacher with two master's degrees and 29 years in the classroom, opens this conversation by compressing her life into less than a minute: the war started when she was eight or nine years old, her mother counted more than 20 cousins, aunts, and uncles killed by the Nazis, and when she couldn't leave a difficult marriage, she gave herself a...

When Christine Emba, writer and author of "Rethinking Sex: A Provocation," told me about a young man who took crystal meth to hollow out his cheekbones, I felt that familiar 3am dread, because underneath every bit of that bravado is fear, and I see it in our kids.  So here's the thing: this episode is about why Gen Z has stopped dating, stopped connecting, and started "optimizing" themselves into...

When my son Zak Koenigs, founder of Prospect Forge, walked back into the studio for this second conversation, I could feel immediately that something had shifted in him, and honestly, that shift is the whole reason I brought him back.  We went deep on the data that should be keeping every parent of a son up at night: Scott Galloway's finding that 1 in 7 young men now reports zero friends, Gen Z un...

Dr. Daniel Amen, psychiatrist, brain imaging pioneer, and author of Raising Mentally Strong Kids, asked me something early in our conversation that I haven't been able to shake: "How do you know unless you look?" He's been asking that question for 45 years, armed with nearly 300,000 SPECT brain scans, and watching his colleagues diagnose this complex, extraordinary organ without a single piece of...

I have been asked one question more than almost any other: "Vivian, why did you start all of this?" And the real answer (the one that actually matters) is that I became a mother, and everything I thought I knew about myself got rewritten overnight.  This episode is probably the most personal one I've done, because I'm going to take you all the way back: to a hospital in Uganda where a thirteen-yea...

John Assaraf, behavioral neuroscience researcher and founder of NeuroGym, said something to me in this conversation that I haven't been able to stop thinking about: "In the absence of practice, we all default to our highest level of training, or lack thereof."  That hit me somewhere deep. Because so many of us are parenting from our own unexamined defaults, while our kids are getting their brains...

Here's the thing…I sat across from my friend Lisa Garr, someone who has spent 20-plus years interviewing the greatest minds in consciousness and personal growth, and she looked at me and basically said, "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing as a mom." 100%. And I just loved her so much for that. Lisa is the host of The AWARE Show, a woman who has given voice to Wayne Dyer, Bruce Lipton, and Jo...

When you feel the system is rigged and you have no power, sometimes the only place left to turn is the courthouse. Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims' Law Center, has spent the last four years building an airtight case against the companies that knowingly designed their platforms to be addictive to our kids.  During our conversation, he walked me through the landmark trial agains...

"I wasn't handling it well." That's how Elaine Taylor-Klaus, parent educator and founder of ImpactParents.com, describes her early years raising three kids with ADHD, learning disabilities, anxiety, and autism. Not from a place of shame, but from a place of radical honesty that every parent in the trenches needs to hear.  Here's what Elaine knows that most parents don't: the struggle isn't just ab...

I'm going to be real with you: when my son was in crisis, every doctor I saw handed me a prescription instead of an answer. And I kept thinking, "Has ANYONE actually looked at what's happening inside his body?" That question is exactly what Dr. Henna Karna, mathematician turned AI innovator and Harvard fellow, has spent years trying to answer. Here's what Henna knows that most parents don't: the b...

Dr. Aimie Apigian stopped me in my tracks when she said: "It's not my words, it's not that phrase I'm going to say that will make the difference. I am the medicine." As someone who spent years desperately trying to say the right thing to my son while he was curled up on the couch in that heartbreaking shame posture, this hit me somewhere deep. Dr. Aimie is a trauma physician, surgery residency sur...

I'll never forget when my son looked at me and said, "I just don't know how to win here. I can't do anything right." And I thought, I'm a bad mom. Then I sat down with Mat Boggs, relationship expert and author of Cracking the Man Code, and everything clicked. Here's what Mat knows that most of us don't: a man's greatest desire is to have his thoughts respected, and his greatest fear is inadequacy....

Here's what keeps me up at night: watching a generation of kids lose themselves to screens, and then finding hope in the moment one of them wakes up and becomes the voice we need. Keegan Lee was 16 when she realized social media was stealing her life, and instead of just detoxing and moving on, she turned her struggle into "60 Days of Disconnect" and became a Gen Z insider translating the digital...

Kate Winslet stood up and said what so many of us feel but rarely say out loud: we don't want social media to harm our kids. And here's the thing, the world is finally listening. Australia just became the first major country to ban social media for kids under 16. Norway is close behind. States across the U.S. are passing laws. And here I am in my living room thinking, why did it take so long for t...

When JJ Virgin was on the show recently, we barely scratched the surface on something that has genuinely changed how I think about fueling my brain and body. I had to bring her back because this conversation is too important, especially for those of us running on empty, dealing with anxiety, or just trying to keep up with the relentless demands of modern parenting. JJ breaks down the research on c...

"I just remember thinking, I have no context of what to say to my friend." That's Priya Patel at 13, watching multiple friends come to school with bandages on their wrists, completely paralyzed because no one had taught her what to do. Here's what this 20-year-old Wharton double major knows that most parents don't: your kid's mental health reflects their mental diet just like their body reflects w...

Here's the thing: 90% of women don't just dislike their bodies. They hate them. And whether we want to admit it or not, we're passing that straight to our kids. Jennifer Joy Jimenez gets it because she lived it. From professional dancer with severe body dysmorphia to transformational health coach, she discovered something most therapists won't tell you: five minutes of freeform dance is more effec...

So here's the thing: I spent nearly 20 years building hospitals and schools in Uganda, fighting to save adolescent girls from forced marriage and early pregnancy, and then I looked up and realized the biggest battle was happening right in my own living room. In this conversation with Sammy Tagget, I pull back the curtain on how Project Grit and The Bad Mom Podcast were born, and honestly, it's mes...

I remember JJ Virgin telling me years ago that her son Grant said, "I'm just gonna go get hit by a car" — and then he actually got hit by a car. Hit-and-run. Airlifted. Deep coma. Torn aorta. Multiple brain bleeds. Thirteen fractures. The doctors gave him a 0.125% chance of survival, and if he did survive, he'd be so brain damaged "it wouldn't be worth it." But here's what those doctors didn't kno...

When your child is spiraling into addiction, the first instinct is to hold on tighter: plead, negotiate, or wait for them to “hit bottom.”  But what if those instincts are exactly what are keeping your child in danger? What if addiction isn’t about waiting for readiness, but about stepping in before the fire spreads? As parents, we often believe we’re failing when our kids won’t accept help. We bl...

When we see our kids sinking into anxiety, depression, or even addiction, our first instinct is: “How do I fix them?” We scramble for therapists, schools, treatments, and programs, anything that might help our child get better. But here’s the hard truth: in many cases, it’s not only your child who needs help, you do too. Addiction and mental health struggles rarely live in isolation. They ripple t...

Every parent I know worries about the same things: Why won’t my kid put down the phone? Why do they care more about strangers online than conversations at home?  Are they losing themselves to comparison, anxiety, and endless scrolling? We set limits, we nag, we fight about screen time. Yet beneath the rules and arguments is a deeper fear: Am I actually reaching my child, or am I losing them to a w...

We’ve created a generation that’s overstimulated, overprotected, and underprepared for real life. In this raw and revealing conversation, Dave Asprey — the father of biohacking, four-time New York Times bestselling author, and host of The Human Upgrade Podcast — joins Vivian Glyck to talk about the biology of anxiety and why calm, consistent boundaries are the key to raising resilient kids. Dave e...

Get Your FREE Bad Mom Survival Kit to PARENT IN REALITY: https://badmompodcast.com/parentinginreality Feeling like a bad mom? You’re not alone. In this episode, Vivian Glyck talks with Cy Wakeman , bestselling author, therapist, and mom of four, about how ego, fear, and over-parenting are fueling the anxiety epidemic—and what parents can do differently. Cy shares practical tools for emotional regu...

What do you do when your child shuts down, drifts away, or escapes into dangerous coping—and nothing you try seems to work? In this raw and hopeful episode of The Bad Mom Podcast , Vivian Glyck talks with Andre Norman, once a gang leader in maximum security prison, now a Harvard fellow and world-renowned mentor known as The Ambassador of Hope . Andre shares his powerful journey and gives parents t...