Worry Wise

Freeing yourself and your family from everyday worry, anxiety and doubt

Tamar Chansky Ph.D.

When Your Relationship Needs Some Spring Cleaning

If you’re not so much feeling the zing of spring right now, no worries. Some spring cleaning may be in order.

Spring Cleaning for Your Emotions

It is difficult to access the joy that is right in front of us with the emotional clutter of negativity getting in the way.

Can We Really Have a Happy Valentine's Day This Year?

Even in a crisis, even in an emergency, we work in shifts. Some of us always need to be on love duty. We need to put the oxygen masks on our relationships first.

Yes, Your Teen Is Going to College, But Are They Ready?

Kids in college, apart from parent's texts, phone calls and occasional visits, are suddenly set with the task of carrying their own lives on their backs.

How to Take Charge When Your Child Gets Bossy

Parents are always in charge and the best way to show is not to rub it in, but to redirect your child's demands and teach them the difference between a preference and a protocol.

Stuck With Kids on Valentine's Day? Do This!

We don’t need to proclaim that your marriage is more important than your children. Let's just agree your relationship with your kids and your spouse are different.

Why You Should Kiss More

There's nowhere to hide in a kiss, and hiding is not so good for marriages. So, a way of not hiding that is free, fast, and doesn't require a babysitter? That's a good thing.

Parents Are Not Perfect (Either)

The reason parents get wedged into their own name-calling corners is that we don't let ourselves share the frustration, a little at a time, that naturally and predictably builds when we feel ignored or tested. Instead, we wait, and wait, and wait patiently as our children do everything but what we want, and then like any good combustion engine, we blow.

Homework Time: Could Your Help Actually Hinder?

Of course you're going to help your child with homework, we all are, but if you really want your help to help and not hinder, you're going to help them with what they actually can't do themselves. And even then, you're going to share the job with them, meet in the middle and do the proverbial "teaching them how to fish" so that they won't go hungry next time and beyond.

4 Things Pixar's Inside Out Can Teach Parents About Emotions

Every time we see tears in our children's eyes our inner control panel goes through the same process —we want to body dive sadness and get it off our kids — fast. I would say that this lesson to not fear our children's sadness is the one that we have to relearn just about every time we see tears. I don't want my kids to be sad.

How to Respond to Your "Mouthy" Child

One of the best ways to teach your child about flexibility is by demonstrating your own. This is what the fine art of diplomacy really sounds like. Because in the end, if you sound like a brat while correcting your child from sounding like a brat, well, Houston, we've got problems.

How to Plan Your Child's Summer "Work Week"

The radical (to your child) idea is that you can do some work in the summer—whether that be pitching in around the house, or reviewing math facts— and still have a great summer. Don’t want to be the bearer of bad news? You’re not. You didn’t invent this. It’s called life. And it’s actually good for them—and you.

Teach Kids the Wisdom of Failure Long Before Graduation

Our job is to not wait for graduation to talk about failure and success. It’s a little late then. Rather, we need to be rolling out the red carpet for our kids throughout their education. Making saying “I don’t know” or making mistakes safe. Making “I don’t know for sure” a noble and defendable position.

10 Tips for Correcting Your Anxious Child

Anxious kids are so afraid of messing up and getting in trouble. They are constantly rattled by the thought that someone could be mad at them. They stress about it all day, and have bad dreams about it at night. So wouldn’t it be helpful for them to learn that the thing they fear most— messing up— is survivable and maybe even not that bad, not to mention pretty rare?

Helping Your Anxious Child Overcome Bedtime Fears

It’s not their bed, or the house, or the dolls—it’s what their mind, and specifically their “worry brain” is telling them about those things that is making them so frightened. So while you’re tempted to just reassure your child that everything’s fine, chances are you already know—that doesn’t work.Instead, teach your child to be the boss and not get tricked by their worry!

How to Fall in Love (Again, With the Same Person)

By answering many probing questions that reveal intimate details about themselves, couples make deep, lasting connections. This is what researchers find is relationship super glue: We consistently like the people with whom we do back and forth self-disclosure. We like them a lot. So much, that we might even fall in love with them all over again!

Overcoming Emetophobia, a.k.a. The Fear of Throwing Up

Worry thoughts about throwing up are like “the boot in the fridge.” Imagine if you were to open up your fridge and see a boot in there, you wouldn’t say, “Hmmm, I guess I have to have sautéed boot for dinner,” you’d say—“What is that doing in there?! It doesn’t belong there!!”

How to Teach Your Children Generosity During the Holidays

Self-centeredness and generosity are not mutually exclusive; they are more like next-door neighbors. In other words, your child has the capacity for both. It may drive us crazy to hear the gimmes, but if we want our kids to learn generosity, we’ll be better served to pause, exhale and teach our kids to feel good about giving.

How to Talk to Your Child (and Yourself) About Ebola

The problem facing most Americans is not the Ebola virus, it’s our anxiety about the Ebola virus. Yes, we are good at panicking, but we are also good at steadying ourselves and being smarter than our worry, and this is our opportunity to get even better at that.

How to Prevent Homework Procrastination

The brain has a hard time transitioning, starting things that don’t have immediate gratification waiting. But, the brain does like finishing things. So a parent’s job is to help kids develop a routine to quickly jumpstart their work, get a hook into those books, so that their wired-in desire to finish things will reel them in and help them get the work done.

Homework Is Stupid and I Hate Everything

If kids knew to expect the struggle, and viewed it as temporary and manageable, and that on the other side of it is the aha moment of success and pride—well, they wouldn’t be so set on avoiding their work fearing that it will gobble them (and their self-esteem) up; they’d head in knowing that they will emerge triumphant soon (like they always do).

What Robin Williams Can Teach Us

We don’t have to feel the same things that people with depression do, or even understand them. But by trusting in the existence of that dark and murky reality, and leaning in to those who see it, perhaps we can offer a life-line, a connection, a glimpse of another way that life can feel, that even temporarily those who suffer may just be able to grab hold of.

Taking Charge of Back-to-School Fears

All anxiety starts with the same experience. The “yikes” button gets pushed and kids think: “Yikes! Can I really do that?" The answer of course is yes, but worry's automatic reaction is—no! Better than any reassurance, when you teach your child that worry is something to test, not trust, you are teaching them skills that will serve them well all throughout their life.

Help, I’m Homesick!

The uneasiness makes sense. Your role as a parent at this point is not to take it away (if you even could!), but to help explain it, normalize it, contain it and most of all help your child understand that it is temporary and it will pass.

The Do-Over, or 5 Phrases That Saved My Family Vacation

Rather than makes things worse by wasting time finding the misunderstandings under the rubble of the hour long recapitulation, re-hashings and analysis, when all the good parking spaces of the beach were taken, we made things better–quickly–by offering the opportunity to, respectfully, rewind and try that one again.

Six Ways for Parents to Keep Their Stress to Themselves

It’s not the ups and downs of burnt toast that are a problem for us and by extension our kids. It’s our reaction to these events. In the interactive world of crossed emotional wires, or what has been called by scientists: “the neurobiology of we,” our detours into internal distress challenge our children’s inner sense of safety: we take them along for that bumpy ride.

Teach Your Child to Think Like an Olympic Athlete

In sports, managing the mind is as important as managing the body. Practicing mind-management yields what United States figure skater Jeremy Abbott describes as “mental toughness.” I think of it as mental agility—being flexible in your mind to put your focus where you need it most.

How to Improve Your Relationship With One Simple Word

When we are thinking “we” our bodies respond in kind. The magic of this word we is that it’s a game-changer. When we say “we” we set in motion a “connectedness” program in the brain (and body) and so that rather than being in survival mode (think: you against me), we can be creative, generous, collaborative and loving whether we are cleaning up cat barf or making love.

A Zen Holiday Mash Up

Maybe the very thing we crave most is reconnecting anew with what we already have. The people in our lives, and yes, maybe the things too-- though seen in a new light.

Help! My Kids Have Too Much Time On Their Hands

Take my too much to do life combine it with my kids too little to do life, and you have two very different weather systems colliding in my kitchen—the result: a storm, a melt down, me being a monster, feeling like the kids are (forgive me) leisure monsters, it is not too pretty. But I figured out a solution and it’s a win-win and it’s called the Common Good List.

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