Why Is My Child So Anxious? Dr. Daniel Amen on Raising Mentally Strong Kids
About this episode
Dr. Daniel Amen discusses the connection between brain health and child anxiety, offering insights on parenting mentally strong kids.
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 biological data. Here's what Dr. Amen knows that most parents don't: what looks like a mental health problem is almost always a brain health problem, and when you actually look at the brain, the answers hiding underneath the diagnosis are often completely different from what anyone expected. He walked me through the four-circle model he uses at Amen Clinics, biological, psychological, social, and spiritual, and why medicating a symptom without understanding the root is like putting a cast on a leg you haven't X-rayed. The framework he introduced from Raising Mentally Strong Kids, built on the Love and Logic model with Charles Fay, gave me one of the simplest and most powerful reframes I've heard in this space: if you do too much for your children, you are building your self-esteem by…
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