How do you define success when it comes to getting anxiety or OCD under control? What does “recovery” look like to you? What does it look like to your child? How we view success and how we convey it to our kids is critical. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I explore what a healthy view of “success” looks like and how to communicate that effectively to our kids.
When kids feel stigma attached to their OCD they are less likely to want to discuss it or receive treatment. One of the first steps we can do to help kids with OCD is to help remove the stigma society has placed on this disorder. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about the importance of removing stigma around OCD and concrete ways to do that.
How to Help Kids with the Fear of Dying This episode is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace the guidance of a qualified professional. The fear of dying is a common core fear in both anxiety and OCD. So how do we help kids deal with something that inevitably will happen to all of us? In this week’s AT Parenting Survival […]
Many of you know that we suddenly lost my husband due to a blood clot in 2021. It has been a bumpy journey with grief for me and my children since then. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I discuss how I’ve helped my kids with anxiety and OCD navigate grief, what I discovered about loss and my new children’s grief book.
Raising kids with anxiety or OCD is hard enough. But when you add chronic pain to your daily routine it can push you over the edge. Often we backburner our own issues. We tell ourselves that we don’t have time for our struggles. That we don’t have time to address our needs. We push through and do more damage in the end. But the truth is if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be able to effectively take care of your child. Helping a child with anxiety or OCD is exhausting and chronic pain will only add to that fatigue. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk to Dr. Andrea Durand, my go-to expert on all things pain related. She explores our relationship with chronic pain and discusses ways we can address the pain to minimize its impact on our daily lives.
Shaun Flores had been suffering from OCD for years without knowing it. He hopped from OCD theme to OCD theme, listening to OCD’s lies and searching for certainty with each new worry. It wasn’t until 2022, when he finally met the right therapist, that he learned that all of his fears had one explanation, OCD. Shaun has turned his OCD pain into a passion to advocate. Since his diagnosis he has added a new face to the OCD advocacy scene. A face that was desperately underrepresented. As a black man, he is helping normalize a disorder that doesn’t care about race, ethnicity or gender. In this week’s episode of the AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I had the honor to talk to Shaun about his journey with OCD and the incredible work he is doing to help others.
We all want our kids with anxiety or OCD to use coping skills to deal with anxiety, overwhelm, and dysregulation. But what happens when they refuse to use them? In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I talked to my go-to expert on coping skills, best-selling author and therapist, Janine Halloran. In this episode, Janine and I discuss why some kids refuse to use coping skills and what approaches to use in order to help them embrace these tools.
When we are in the trenches trying to help our kids with anxiety or OCD it can be hard to think of our kids flourishing. Often, however, it is within the struggle itself that some kids can find resiliency and purpose. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I invited Stephanie Krauss, author of Whole Child, Whole Life, to discuss her own journey with her son’s OCD as well as elements of her new book that offer a shift in perspective.
When we are raising kids with OCD it is important that we fully understand the therapeutic approaches our kids are being taught in therapy. Ultimately we will want our kids to be able to utilize those tools throughout their life. The use of imaginal scripts can be an effective tool in their OCD toolbox. In this episode of the AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore what imaginal scripts are, how to write an effective one and the most common pitfalls that make them less effective.
Anxiety and OCD can impact executive functioning in so many different ways. When our children are being bombarded with upsetting thoughts, executive functioning skills can go out the window. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I invited Rachel Kapp and Stephanie Pitts, educational therapists and the hosts of the Learn Smarter Podcast, to discuss ways we can help our kids improve their executive functioning skills.
One of the most common anxiety themes is the fear of choking. Kids with this fear often hyperfocus on what they eat and how they eat. At its worst they can avoid all sorts of foods that they feel are “unsafe.” This can limit their diet and cause nutritional issues. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore the many ways a choking fear can show up, how the fear grows and strategies to help your child move through the fear.
Anxiety and OCD can hit self-esteem hard. Having self-compassion and self-love can be an uphill battle. How do we talk to ourselves? How much self-compassion do we show ourselves? Resilience is another key factor in our kids’ long term success. Resilience doesn’t mean we don’t crumble. It is what we do with the crumbs that counts. How do we show up to our child’s struggles? How do we show up to our own life’s struggles? In this week’s episode of the AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about how to improve our own self-compassion and resilience to model those skills for our children.
Dealing with OCD isn’t like dealing with a cold. It isn’t cured and then we move on. It can help to shift our perspective to focus on how to live and, more importantly, thrive with OCD. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about how to shift our kids from a victim to an empowerment mentality (and us as well)! We also dive into how to create a lifestyle that acknowledges and works on OCD organically within the home environment.
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