Raising Mentally Healthy Kids with Michelle Nietert

With so many young adults struggling with anxiety and depression as they return to school after the holidays, I wanted to release a bonus episode answering questions from author Melissa Spoelstra about parenting young adults who need to find a counselor. In this episode, we’ll discuss some practical aspects such as insurance coverage and the variety of mental health professionals available to help your child as well as offer you some tips on questions to ask prospective counselors, when it’s time to seek professional help, and how to encourage your child to get help without offending them.

Key points from our conversation:

🩺 If insurance is a deal-breaker, call your company and get the names of 10 Christian counselors that are in-network, then narrow them down by finding out who is taking new patients. Have your child do research online like reading bios and watching videos to see who they connect with best. Telehealth may be a good option if you’re in a rural area.

✝️ Therapists use different approaches when it comes to treatment. When interviewing prospective counselors, have your child ask if they are a Christian who does counseling or if they integrate faith into best counseling practices. Also, ask if they are a biblical counselor who doesn’t integrate psychology and if they are a directive or non-directive therapist.

🚨 If your young adult tends to change their mind about counseling, but chronic problems persist, encourage them to find a counselor as quickly as possible. Use the urgency to prevent a future emergency.

🗣️ If your child is resistant because they view counseling as a sign of weakness, normalize it. Since 2020, 40% of young adults 18-24 are experiencing diagnosable anxiety and depression. Practice empathic listening and try changing the verbiage from “you need counseling” to “you could benefit from counseling.”

😖 Panic attacks are immediate criteria for therapy because it means they’re at a place where their mind is not able to control the body in such a way that things happen that are out of control.

🥼 Seeing a therapist should be as normal as seeing a doctor. When in doubt, check it out.

🧠 You may not notice ADHD in your young adult before college because home life and school can provide a structure they can manage. Smarter kids can take even longer to diagnose because their intelligence compensates for their lack of executive management skills.

👂 When your young adult comes home and shares struggles, reassure them that you get it and they’re not alone. Engage them by asking how they would like to try to solve the problem. Offer to get them help, even if they get offended. If you’re the authority, you make the call even if they don’t want to. You know what’s best for them.

Resources mentioned:

Smart but Scattered by Peg Dawson

Connect with Melissa: website | Instagram | Facebook

Often our children’s first experience with death is the loss of a pet. In the second half of my interview with Director of Child and Adolescent Counseling Sissy Goff, M. Ed., LPC-MHSP, we’re talking about how we can help our kids process loss and teach them about grief. We’re also offering some helpful tips on how to gauge how well your child is moving through the grieving process and when it’s time to seek professional help.

Key points from our conversation:

🐶 It’s important to honor the loss with kids and give them the time and space to grieve. Sometimes we don’t want to see our kids hurting so we circumvent the process.

💔 Sometimes acknowledging your child’s pain is enough. All kids experience grief differently and will need to honor their pets in different ways.

🤐 Sometimes because we’re also grieving children won’t express their emotions because they don’t want to make us sadder. Their grief may be more significant than we know.

🧠 Normalize mental health checkups. It gives your child a safe place so if something happens, they already have an established relationship.

✉️ Encourage your child to write a letter to the pet or memorize it some way. Tell your kids that it’s okay to talk to their pets in heaven. Remembering is not bad, it’s good.

😢 Occasionally ask your child on a scale of 1-10 how sad they are about the loss. The number should be naturally going down over time. If not, it’s time to seek a counselor.

💬 Communicate to your kids that there’s nothing we together with God can’t get through. Give them hope and strength in the knowledge that you are capable. It might require help, but it’s okay to ask for help. If you do appear fragile, they will likely hide things from you.

Resources mentioned:Braver, Stronger, Smarter: A Girl’s Guide to Overcoming Worry & Anxiety Dog Heaven FREE empathetic listening printable

Connect with Sissy: website | Instagram | Facebook | podcast

You can find more resources about mental health, parenting, and coping with anxiety at MichelleNietert.com.

Please be sure to subscribe to the Raising Mentally Healthy Kids podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode! And if this episode helped you we’d love it if you’d leave a review to help other parents find this resource.

And don't forget to join the conversation about raising mentally healthy kids with Michelle on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter!

In the second half of my interview with Neuroscientist and Mental Health Expert Dr. Caroline Leaf, we’re continuing our discussion of how we can learn to retrain our brains by systematically managing our thoughts, feelings, and choices. In this episode we dig into how invalidating our kid’s feelings can affect their mental and physical health, different techniques for temporarily containing instead of repressing anxious thoughts, and Dr. Leaf breaks down her 5 Step NeuroCycle.

Key points from our conversation:

💭 We need to be comfortable sitting with our thoughts. If you’re awake, you’re thinking. Those thoughts have feelings associated with them which led to choices.

♻️ Don’t suppress or invalidate your child’s feelings, instead let them know that feelings are helpful messengers that allow us to explore what’s going on and redesign the pattern. When emotions are suppressed, they recycle in the body and the mind.

🚫 There are no shortcuts to cleaning up your mental mess. It takes at least 63 days to create behavior change.

🧠 Your mind is either managed or unmanaged, but it never stops.

🔎 The first step to being a thought detective is to spot a pattern. Once you recognize it, accept it and prepare your brain for change through breathing and movement exercises that change your neurophysiology.

🧬 Dr. Leaf’s 5 Step NeuroCycle – gather, reflect, write, recheck, and active reach

📦 Neuroplasticity practices like the box and window techniques can provide a way to temporarily contain your anxious thoughts until you can calm down and process through the neurocycle.

Resources mentioned:

Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess Neurocycle app Cleaning Up the Mental Mess Podcast FREE empathetic listening printable

Connect with Caroline: website | Instagram | Facebook

You can find more resources about mental health, parenting, and coping with anxiety at MichelleNietert.com.

Please be sure to subscribe to the Raising Mentally Healthy Kids podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode! And if this episode helped you we’d love it if you’d leave a review to help other parents find this resource.

And don't forget to join the conversation about raising mentally healthy kids with Michelle on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter!

I want to ask you a simple, but hard question - “Are you really okay?” In this episode with licensed professional counselor and author Debra Fileta, we’re focusing on how we as parents can do the hard work of building emotional awareness within ourselves so we can normalize talking about emotions within our homes. Debra also shares how our view of God, others, and self affects our spiritual health and offers a practical exercise you can do with your child to help them explore their emotions and create healthy conversations.

Key points from our conversation:

🩹 Healthy people make healthy relationships. So much of what we learn is modeled, so one of the best things was can do is take care of ourselves.

🌋 It’s crucial that we build emotional awareness. If we don’t release the emotions building under the surface in healthy ways, they will show up in an emotional outburst.

🎨 To help your child unpack their emotions, try the “feeling in my body” activity. Have the child draw an outline of their body and have them color it using different colors to show emotions in the body. The magic of the exercise is in the conversation it creates. It normalizes that it’s good and normal to talk about emotions.

❓ There are over 500 different emotions. Asking questions expands your child’s emotional vocabulary and helps them discover what they’re feeling and why.

✨ Emotions are real, but they are not always true. What makes emotions right or wrong is not feeling them, but what we do with that feeling. Emotional control means lining up what you feel with God’s truth.

✝️ Our view of God, others, and self are a big indicator of spiritual health because we often transfer our hurts to what we think about God. We must know what we truly believe about God. If we believe the wrong things, then our actions are rooted in the wrong things. The why is crucial.

❤️ What you believe about yourself determines the kind of relationship you believe you deserve.

Resources mentioned:

Are You Really OK?: Getting Real About Who You Are, How You’re Doing, and Why It Matters Printable feeling wheel The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Follow Debra: website | Instagram | Facebook | podcast

One of the things I get asked about most in the counseling office is when and how much time kids should be spending on screens because of the correlation between mental health and screen use. With the holidays right around the corner, I want to give you some practical ways to better manage how screens are used in your home. In the first part of my conversation with author Arlene Pellicane, we’re discussing how we address the screen life we have within our families and with our kids. Not all screen time is bad, but it matters how much time we’re spending and what we’re gaining from that time.

Key points from our conversation:

📺 Kids from Gen Z have had access to screens and portable devices since they were born. We need to have parenting tools to help equip our kids to find activities to entertain themselves other than screens.

🧠 When young kids spend time on screens it affects the neurochemicals that build connections in their brain. “Digital candy” experienced through things like gaming, social media, and YouTube provides a rush of dopamine and puts them into the fight-or-flight mode by shutting off blood from the pre-frontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for decision making.

👀 Screens are a struggle for adults as well, so it’s important to model healthy behaviors to help teach digital social etiquette such as looking away from the screen and looking your child in the eye when they’re speaking to you.

📱 There’s no specific age to give your child a phone, but it is wise to have some safeguards in place. They should be able to be responsible in other areas of life and understand that the rules set for their devices applies no matter where they are. It helps teach integrity.

🎮 Playing games isn’t bad. Certain games have modes that develop creativity rather than something that puts them in fight or flight. Encourage them to build social dynamics into their play. If you’re fighting them to get off, they’re overstimulated.

Resources mentioned:

Screen Kids: 5 Relational Skills Every Child Needs in a Tech-Driven World Calm, Cool, and Connected: 5 Digital Habits for a More Balanced Life Happy Home University Happy Home podcast

Connect with Arlene: website | Instagram | Facebook