Kids and Anxiety

in America is bad today, we'll count your blessings. Go back a hundred and forty years to one. That's when a medical doctor wrote a book that warned about the harrowing increase of nervousness in America and the causes he cited. And I kid you not the emergence of the railroad, Western Union and the pocket watch. I guess you could

say it's a matter of degrees. According to doctor Bill sticks Rude, a clinical neuropsychologist in Silver Spring, Maryland and co author of the national bestseller The Self Driven Child, the impact of stress on life today is about ten thousand times greater compared to a hundred forty years ago. Obviously, doctor sticks Root is exaggerating a bit here, but he does so to make two key points. One, it is terrible out there, especially for our kids, and two, as parents,

we can do something about it. I have known doctor sticks Rude as both a friend and a colleague for over twenty years. In addition to his private practice, he also serves as assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He has spent thirty years working with stressed out children, teens,

and young adults. Doctor sticks Rude says, even before the COVID nineteen pandemic make the levels of anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems were an epidemic proportions among kids. Now it's only gotten worse. Kids are suffocating under the pressure to get the best grades to get into the best schools. Parents often ask doctor sticks Root, will it get better for my kid in college? His answer, no,

it actually gets worse. The reality is that the mental health crisis among college students has been escalating for years, and now colleges, including the most elite, can't hire mental health professionals fast enough. Doctor sticks Root has strong advice don't micromanage your teen's life lighten up quote. As parents, we need to be honest with ourselves. We don't always know what's best for our kids. We don't always have

the right answers. The best message we can give a teenager besides I love you, is that I have confidence in your ability to make decisions about your own life. And I have confidence that you will learn from your own mistakes. And I want you to have tons of experience of both before you go off to college. The opposite approach certainly hasn't worked under the gaze of well

meaning but overbearing parents. Kids work ferociously hard for much of their young lives to get into a top college, but once they arrive, they are emotionally unprepared for what follows doctor Sticks, who says there is one thing parents can do to take the pressure off their kids and give them a better shot at a healthy, happy life, and that is not to pressure them to work harder to do more. In fact, parents should encourage the opposite.

Give your kids what he calls radical downtime. Schedule more time for things as simple and incredibly valuable as meditation and sleep, daydreaming and mind wandering doctor Sticks Truth said that teenagers need an average of nine and a quarter hours of sleep, and yet most kids sleep less than seven hours a night during the school year. That means your teen's cognitive capacity is more impaired than if he

or she were legally drunk. But the best thing we as parents can do to send our kids safely off into the world is to foster an ongoing close relationship. Closeness with a parent is like a silver bullet for protecting our kids from emotional distress. He says. As parents, we should strive to become a non anxious presence in the lives of our kids. We all know it's much easier to soothe a crying infant if you stay calm.

It's much easier to handle a three year old who is having a tantrum in a store if you stay calm. And if you've got a fifteen year old who comes home and his girlfriend just dumped him and he's really upset, well, it's much easier to listen and help problem solve if you stay calm. So I leave you with Bill sticks Dud's words, which, as you know, are the title of this podcast. Stay Calm, My advice is to follow Dr sticks Rud's advice, do everything you can to stay calm.

The primary beneficiaries right after you will be your kids. All right, Let's end this time together doing something that I think should be a feature of our everyday life, and that's appreciation and gratitude. So let's take thirty seconds of quiet, thirty seconds to take a break, just take a moment. It turns out when we do that, it's good for our health as well. I'll be right back all right. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you heard something that inspires, that uplifts you and that

you can incorporate into your own life. This is Bob Roth. Stay calm. Hey, all of you out there, I'd love to hear from you. You can send me your stories, your questions, or anything else on your mind. Just connect with me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at Meditation Bob. You can also send me an email at meditation Bob Roth at gmail dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.