Mom Stress and Our Kids

One of the things I have found most amusing in my current stage of parenting is just how absorbent my little people are. My kids repeat nearly everything they hear, including the rogue f-bomb, a habit that my husband and I are now working a bit more diligently to break. Good, bad, happy, or sad, if we are talking about something, my children want to be a part of it. All the more so if their parrot-like chit-chat gets a reaction from mom and dad.

Seeing how much young kids take cues from their parents got me wondering about other facets of their learning and developing brains. If kids say what we say, I wonder if they feel what we feel too. 

Parenting these past few years has been so hard, right? I started thinking, is our overall stress and worry causing our kids to stress and worry on a level that we don’t realize and they don’t understand? Is the weight of the world today going to have a long-term effect on our kids? Will the “wild and free” adolescence that we grew up with be lost on them, therefore creating a generation of anxious and fearful young people? Let’s find out.

On the show with us is Dr. Anisha Patel-Dunn, Chief Medical Officer at LifeStance Health based in San Francisco California. Anisha has nearly 20 years of experience as a practicing psychiatrist and holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Emory University and a medical degree from The College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific at Western University of Health Sciences. As a mother of two, Anisha is passionate about youth mental health and she loves working with families who are looking for ways to communicate more effectively with each other.