Stories as Tools for Anxiety Management with Former Sesame Street Director, Dr. Anna Housley-Juster

What if the key to managing childhood anxiety lies in the stories we tell? Discover how storytelling can transform anxiety from a daunting monster into a friendly guide, as Dr. Anna Housley-Juster, a licensed mental health clinician and author of "How to Train Your Amygdala," joins us. With a blend of empathy and humor, Anna shares her insights on how understanding the brain's alarm system can empower children to see anxiety as a protective mechanism rather than a foe. She reveals her unique strategies for using storytelling to foster emotional resilience, making complex concepts like the amygdala accessible and engaging for young minds.

With a background as Director of Content for Sesame Street, Anna explores how fun and playful narratives can demystify challenging topics, like anxiety management, to help children connect with characters and their experiences. By integrating practice and co-regulation, adults and children together can reshape brain pathways, enhancing focus and reducing threat responses. Our conversation emphasizes the necessity of a collaborative approach, providing practical insights into building a reliable pathway to calmness and emotional understanding.

By integrating brain education into broader curriculums and fostering open conversations, parents and educators can empower children with the vocabulary and strategies to articulate and manage their feelings. This episode serves as a call to action for schools and communities to prioritize mental health education, ensuring equitable access to these vital skills. Join us in championing positive change in education and creating a supportive environment for children's growth and learning. 

Chapters

• 0:35 Rising Rates of Anxiety in Children
• 3:00 Dr. Anna Housley Juster Introduction
• 5:51 The Amygdala, Understanding Anxiety Responses
• 8:15 Strategies for Anxiety Management
• 15:23 Storytelling to Enhance Children's Understanding
• 19:02 Practice, Practice, Practice
• 22:18 Story and Teaching Tool
• 27:49 Hopes for Children's Mental Health Education
• 30:08 Closing and Call to Action

Transcript

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:09

Welcome to the Brighter Side of Education: Research, Innovation and Resources. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables and how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? In this episode, we explore ways to help children manage anxiety and build emotional resilience through the power of storytelling and practical strategies. Before we begin our conversation, I'd like to highlight a growing concern in education the rising rates of anxiety among children and its impact on their learning and overall well-being. Recent research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that anxiety disorders affect approximately 7% of children between the ages of 3 and 17 in the United States. Now, this translates to about 4.4 million children and adolescents struggling with anxiety, which can significantly hinder their educational experiences and social development. A study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2021 found that anxiety in children not only affects their mental health, but also their academic performance, social relationships and long-term life outcomes. The research emphasizes the need for early intervention and practical strategies to help children manage their anxiety effectively. To understand why addressing anxiety is crucial for learning, we can turn to Abram Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a foundational theory in psychology and education. Maslow's pyramid illustrates that before individuals can reach self-actualization and achieve their full potential, including effective learning, they must first have their basic needs met. These needs include physiological requirements of safety, love and belonging and esteem. Now anxiety, which often stems from unmet needs for safety and security, can significantly impede a child's progress up this hierarchy. When a child is anxious, their focus is on managing their immediate feelings of distress rather than engaging in higher-level cognitive tasks essential for learning. By addressing anxiety, we're essentially helping children feel more secure, which allows them to move up Maslow's hierarchy and become more receptive to learning and personal growth. Now this is where innovative approaches like using storytelling and age-appropriate explanations of brain function can play a crucial role. By providing children with tools to understand and manage their emotions, we can potentially mitigate the negative impacts of anxiety on their educational journey and overall development. These strategies align with Maslow's theory by helping children feel safer and more in control, thereby creating a stronger foundation for learning and self-actualization.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 3:01

Today we are joined by Dr Anna Housley-Juster, a licensed mental health clinician, education consultant and children's book author, who firmly believes in the power of play With experiences. As a teacher, as well as director in children's media, Dr. Housley brings a wealth of knowledge to our discussion. Her work as director of content for Sesame Street has given her unique insights into creating engaging educational content for children. Dr Juster's work spans mental and behavioral health, curriculum development and innovative practices to support children's learning and emotional well-being. Dr Housley Juster, welcome to the show, thank you. So your new children's book, how to Train your Amygdala, which I have right here it's amazing, by the way. Really love it. It tackles the complex topic of anxiety in children. So could you explain what inspired you to write this book and why you chose to focus on the amygdala?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 3:56

So the idea for this book evolved from my direct clinical practice with very young children, and especially during COVID when I was doing only telehealth. I got to see into kids' lives a little bit more than you do when you're in the office. And there was a point where I had a client who I was working with who's about eight or so, sitting with her cat on her lap in front of her Chromebook and she was stroking her cat as we were doing psychoeducation about how she was managing the stress that was coming up at home and her anxiety. And we realized together that as she was calming her cat by relaxing it, by calming it by sort of being there, present and being kind and empathetic and sweet, she was using a strategy that you could use also for your brain and specifically we were talking about the amygdala and the way that the amygdala it's kind of the usual suspect for the alarm system in the brain, and so I wanted to take sort of some of the work I was doing directly in the storytelling that was coming up in practice and try to put it into a way that I could then use it again with my own clients but then it could become accessible to others.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 5:09

Typically, the books I was reading with kids about anxiety and worry tend to focus on there being a dragon in your brain, a monster. That's anxiety, which I think can work for some kids. It's also pretty distressing for some kids to think that there's like a bad monster in yourself that you're pushing away against. So the goal with how to train your amygdala is to take the power of story that evolved from my work and make it accessible, but with humor and compassion for the amygdala, because it is a fun word to say and it does get itself in a lot of trouble, but we need to love it and we need to align with it in order to have the brain-body connection that can lead to the skills that will actually help to calm anxiety. So that's the backstory.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 5:50

Yeah, and I like how in the book you talk about its purpose to keeping us alive. It is a survival thing, so there's a really good reason why we have it and why we need it. And in the book you talked about the metaphor of the amygdala being an alarm. How does that resonate with a child?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 6:07

to understand anxiety a little bit better yeah, I mean, I think the first thing that we think about when we think about an alarm is an emergency, and that is what the amygdala perceives. So, just like you said, the example in the book is imagine you are about to cross the street and suddenly a car takes the car.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 6:27

It bypasses cortex, it bypasses thought, because it would be really bad in that minute if we stopped and thought, like hmm, I think there's a car coming towards me and I see that the perspective of that driver is that they are not slowing down. Therefore, what I need to do is stop. They are not slowing down. Therefore, what I need to do is stop. And so I help kids understand that sometimes we need alarm, we need urgent, we need that mechanism in the brain, and the world is not actually as scary as our amygdala thinks it is.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 7:16

The world is a very scary place right now and I have a lot of kids managing a lot of fear, which is understandable, and a lot of the time the amygdala is this lovable, overzealous piece of us that so desperately wants to protect us and just sometimes gets it wrong. And what I help kids understand is, with the alarm, it's actually something you're probably going to feel first before you register it. So you'll notice the effect of alarm as rapid heart rate, nauseousness, breathing up in the top of the lungs, because now your body's trying to get as much oxygen as possible, because it's getting ready to run away, to flee or to fight. So we tune into the alarm in the body what that feels like. And now then we're layering on the psychoeducation. This doesn't just have to happen to you, as if it's out of your control, as if you never will be able to contain that alarm. It's an alarm you could slow down, quiet train basically.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 8:13

Yeah, yeah, and you go through a lot of those responses, the various coping strategies for anxiety in your book. Do you want to share a couple of them, maybe that parents or educators can use?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 8:25

Yes, there's three main strategies that come up in this book and they're really deeply tied to evidence-based practice. Like, we know that these strategies work and every child is different and every adult is different in some ways. So the most important thing is that you would use the book as a catalyst for a conversation about what works for you to train your amygdala. So for some kids, it might be listening to music, it could be taking a walk away from whatever was distressing, it could be a hug, it could be having your hair brushed or braided. So it really needs to be specific to a context and a person. That said, because I had the space of one book to talk about it, the strategies that the amygdala asks the reader to do in order to help the amygdala to be calm are controlled breathing, progressive muscle relaxation and visual imagery. So controlled breathing means exactly what it sounds like.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 9:27

Breathing is the only autonomic function that we have that is both autonomic. We don't have to wake up in the morning and decide to breathe, although it's a good idea, because a lot of times we're holding our breath and we can control it, and that's neurofeedback basically. So when you control your breath, you're sending a message back to your amygdala and the other sort of threat response components of the brain and the body to say, listen, if we were being traced by a lion, we would not be pausing to take these long, deep breaths. We'd be rushing as fast as we could to get away from the actual danger that would be causing actual fear. And in the content of the story the amygdala teaches the reader elevator breath specifically, so you're down in, like your diaphragmatic breathing to start, so you're breathing down into the lower part of your lungs. We can try it together.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 10:22

Yeah, yeah, I was like, as I'm like straightening up and holding my hand there, like, put your hand on your upper abdomen, under your ribs, and you're breathing into there first and you imagine an elevator that's going up floors as you breathe. So you're breathing in like one, two, three four five, six.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 10:42

You could have six floors and then your elevators coming down and you're breathing six, five, four, three, two, one. The other visual is like waves coming in. So on that page the amygdala is lying on a beach blanket. The illustrator, cynthia Cliff, is fantastic. My editor, cassie, is amazing at thinking about, well, how are we going to work with the art on this? And I think it really works, because then the cat who shows up is laying on a towel and relaxing at the beach and you're picturing as you're breathing, the waves are coming in two, three, four, out, four, three, two, one.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 11:25

If you want to count, yeah, so there's controlled breath and there's a section at the back that's for parents and educators and a section for kids that's like the amygdala training manual that teach other strategies like figure eight breathing or lazy eight breathing, square breathing and dragon breath.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 11:43

Because sometimes, if there's any parents or teachers out there that have offered children a breathing strategy when they're already in threat response mode nope, not for some kids that's actually activating, because it's like you don't see the threat that my brain is experiencing right now. So if you're slowing down and asking me to take deep breath, that means we're both going to get eaten by the lion and that's scary. So you kind of have to time it well, and dragon breath is when you just get it all out. So it's like you take a giant deep breath in and blow out like you're blowing out flames. You can either think of it like you want to blow out the fire or you're breathing fire right, because now you are in big threat response modes. Someone just threw a toy at your head in your preschool classroom or something, and you are now going into fight response mode.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 12:30

So there's various ways to do controlled breathing and then progressive muscle relaxation is intentionally tightening and releasing muscles in a way that again teaches the brain. We wouldn't be doing this intentionally if what we were doing was pumping blood into the major muscle groups in order to sprint away as quickly as possible right. So if you picture a two-year-old tantrum, I know you know, like.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 12:54

What does it look like in the body? It's like as tight as possible. It's like Frankenstein, tight Like you're, just like. That's because that body is getting ready to fight and maybe that child does. You know, throw a punch, kick, try to bite. When you teach that child to intentionally tighten and release muscles, the child is using other areas of the brain and then the body to control the response and that's calming. The third is visual imagery, which is especially a fancy way to say imagination, which is using your thoughts. The other two are body-based, back to the brain sort of input, and this is to use thoughts which activates other areas of the brain to picture a place where you feel safe, and that can be very calming to the amygdala.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 13:42

Yeah, absolutely. I was just thinking about the little girl who was petting a cat. And they actually sell a toy to help with anxiety. That's this little cat, you pet it to help with anxiety. That's this little cat, you pet it. And as you're petting it, then the purring calms down.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 14:04

So by helping the cat relax, by petting, you're actually then helping yourself yes, most definitely I have to get that.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 14:07

And people have written to me and said they want a plush amygdala, they want something to squeeze, because when the amygdala practices the squeezing and releasing, it squeezes a teddy bear.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 14:19

And then the kitten who is sort of as the plot unfolds, it's the kitten that's at the door delivering a large cheese pizza and the amygdala thinks it's this dangerous, scary dragon or creature or something that's coming in to attack. And then that kitten shows up on the other pages and you can see how the kitten relaxes throughout the book, along with the two kids that are featured in the book, the characters that are kind of helping the amygdala team train your amygdala. So there's this kitten is kind of throughout and it kind of makes sense because you can see in animals. You know what it looks like when your dog or your cat is in threat response mode. Right, right, yeah, you do. And of course they are so prone to their amygdala sending them down a path of danger when there actually isn't any threat, like it's just the male. But my dog, for example, is in full panic mode when they all laugh every time.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 15:17

Somebody is here? Oh, protect us.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 15:20

Exactly.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 15:23

So your approach combines then storytelling and factual information about brain function. So how do you think the combination enhances children's understanding and engagement with the topic of anxiety management?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 15:37

I mean, I think that if you ever want a child to tune into anything at all, you know I'm a previous teacher and my years at Sesame Street taught me you have to make it fun and playful and that serious things can be taught with comedy Right, taught with comedy right. So we're talking about something that's really important and it's a story about how your brain functions. And some people have said to me can kids really learn how to say the word amygdala? Absolutely, it's not that different from the word rectangle, it's not really any more difficult. It's just that adults don't know it yet, right, because we're playing catch up with science and we're playing catch up with brain development over millions and thousands of years. But so I think to have a compelling story is the primary objective.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 16:23

Yes.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 16:23

And then you're thinking what am I teaching? They have to develop in tandem with one another, yeah, so I did not want it to be didactic. I was looking for how to balance that idea of good story with what the hope is that children would take away from an educational messaging standpoint.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 16:44

Right, it's the hook of an interesting story and then you're giving them the information. That's actually very satisfying and it is kind of a Sesame Street thing when you think about it, because they are drawing the kids in the characters, the lovable fun, yet the situations and the stories that go along with threading into the skill and so you know, and so then that is like they have fun learning.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 17:09

Yeah, and you have to care about your character. I mean the child has to connect in some way and care about the outcome, right? Because if you don't care, if there isn't an intrinsic motivation towards it, you're going to literally walk away from the book, right? Or the TV screen or the iPad. I mean you have to care in some way and I hope that that comes across, because what I'm really hoping is that kids identify with this process, that the alarm can sometimes go off, even if it's not an actual emergency, and think about the amygdala as part of themselves and therefore not blame themselves for anxiety and whatever shows up in their behavior when they are feeling anxious Because I don't believe there are any bad parts of a child, but kids who have a lot of anxiety, especially if it comes out as what we see as anger, with behaviors that get them in a lot of trouble at school and at home Right, then they can start to internalize like there's a bad, there's something wrong with me, something bad about me, and so I'm hoping that, by the caring about the story and the character, they align with this idea that it's teamwork.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 18:24

You know we're working on this together and it's not that there's something wrong with you.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 18:28

Also, I've seen children have anxiety and what it does is it occupies their thoughts.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 18:36

And so, instead of focusing on the engagement in the classroom, they're distracted because they're focusing on this feeling and this emotion that's overwhelming them, and then what ends up happening is then they don't know what's going on in the class and there are maybe little gaps in their knowledge or knowing, so then I could see where then there's this feeling of I'm not doing well, and so you talk about the importance of practice, and so why is it so important for them to be practicing these skills?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 19:09

It's so important to practice because it's like anything else. It's so important to practice because it's like anything else when something becomes a practice and a habit and in this case it actually changes the architecture of the brain you can create new neural pathways and new circuitry, so that you may not get so escalated in the future.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 19:29

But, also, if you do, you know how to come back to your tools, and it's really important for adults to do the same thing.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 19:37

Sometimes we have to tune into our own threat response and have our own practice of how to regulate before we can engage with a child.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 19:44

Because if both a child and an adult are in threat response mode and one amygdala is just raging at the other or one is running away because they're going into freeze or flight, then the child's out of the room, down the hall, maybe out of the school building, and an adult is just sitting with the fight response of like this is threatening to me.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 20:03

I can't handle this behavior anymore. So if you've practiced over time, especially with co-regulation, where an adult and a child are practicing the strategies together, you're less likely to fall back on old habits and habits that maybe are not going to be in the best interest of yourself or of the people around you. You can't ask a child to take a deep breath in the middle of a threat response when the threat response is elevated, and expect that that's the first If they've never practiced that before and you say, oh, just take a deep breath, it's probably not going to work. You have to have trust and you have to have practiced and then you're more likely to have success with calming down the threat response in the moment.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:45

It reminds me of when you were talking about these pathways. I'm imagining, all right, you're in this scary house, it's dark, and then around you is tall grass and you're trying to get back to this safety zone, this nice little patch of happiness, maybe your room or your home, but you don't know the path. So when you get in, it's like you're in the weeds and you don't know what direction to go to.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 21:10

And so the more I go back and forth. Now I'm wearing this path and now I know my way back. I remember how to get out of this. I know exactly where to go. I'll be okay.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 21:20

Yes, and the natural consequence of that is that you feel better when you take that path right. Yeah, like it doesn't feel good to go into threat response mode. No parent feels great after yelling and screaming at a child. So when you go and take that pathway through the dark, it's like muscle memory, but it's also your brain creating a new pathway. Our brains like to create easy pathways, because we need that to survive too. So what you'd need to do is make this the easier pathway and over time, it feels better in the body we have. The emotions that are attached to that pathway are better for us right In the long run, with relationships and reducing the stress that might come up in ourselves. If we're always taking the pathway that's the threat response fear pathway and then you feel better and then you're more likely to take that pathway again. That's a great visual. I think that could be helpful in explaining it to a child. I think that's a really good idea, yeah.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 22:18

Awesome. The book is meant to be both a story and a teaching tool, so how do you envision parents and educators using it to start to open up conversations about anxiety in their homes or in their classrooms?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 22:30

So my hope is that this book is not just a book for kids who have already been identified as being anxious, because the reality is this is a system that's present in all of us all the time, right, like, even if you don't have a diagnosable anxiety disorder, even if you don't have a ton of worry, it is good to know how your brain works, right. So my hope is that this is just a book that anybody could pick up and read with a child, and it could also be an intervention. My other hope is that it's just read as a storybook, so it's not like, hey, you need this book because I saw how you were behaving the other day. I mean, that might happen. We're going to enjoy this book together like we would enjoy any picture book, and what's just embedded are some strategies you're going to do not because you're trying to manage your own anxiety, but because you're trying to help this amygdala character manage its anxiety. And then you're doing the strategies anyway, and then you're doing the practice we just talked about and over time you're creating that pathway that you were just talking about.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 23:33

So my hope is it just starts as like, let's share a story together. I have clients that then go on to read it by themselves. Six, seven, eight year olds if they're reading it's. It's written for the four to eight year old age group, and the four year olds are likely going to be reading it with someone you know. Five it depends on their reading level, but I have a client I work with who reads it to her stuffed animals in her bedroom, and it's like she's now teaching the stuffed animals about how to manage their amygdala in their own brains, and so I think it can take off in a lot of different ways, and again, it's meant to be a conversation starter.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 24:12

Yeah, and I think it also shows some empathy from the adult in that child's life to say I understand that these things that you may experience are natural and that they're okay and let's understand it.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 24:29

Any child can feel anxious at any time for various reasons, and so having more tools to be able to help them at any point is always a wonderful thing. So I could see where it'd be beneficial for the entire class Even, let's say, like you know, I taught second and first grade and you go through the body. So when you're talking about your heart and the nervous system, you could also talk about you know the amygdala. When you're talking about the brain and the nervous system, you could also talk about the amygdala when you're talking about the brain, and I could see where that could even fit in, and then the children would be able to identify with that instead of something that's maybe a little bit more abstract where they can't touch it.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 25:05

This is a great character and it goes along with that storyline, but it also is talking about themselves and in that way they could identify with. Oh, this is something that I do feel and this is why I feel this way, and maybe this could help me so I could see where that would even be good in a science to be able to hook them into. How do they identify with this physiological part of themselves?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 25:29

That's absolutely right. I often wondered why do we stop teaching kids about their body function from the collarbone up? I mean, young kids know that they have a heart, they know it beats, they know it pumps blood around their body. They know they have bones, they know they have lungs. They have that their stomach is where their food goes. They know they need to eat nutritious food. I mean we hope that they're learning that they need to eat and sleep and take care of their body. It's all good.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 25:55

Why are we not teaching kids about brain function? And what I realized, which makes sense, is that neuroscientists have only been catching up with brain function for the past three decades or so. The advent of the fMRI in the mid-1990s let scientists see the function of the brain right, not just the structure but the function. So the reason that kids don't have the language yet is because the everyday adult doesn't have the language yet. So how would the kids have the language?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 26:23

100% agree with you that if we can move towards a time I envision a time when kids can talk about their brains at very young ages from a functional standpoint and learn these skills before behavior patterns get set in that similar pathway you talked about where they automatically go towards fighting or running away.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 26:52

They can understand the function, have the language to attach to it and therefore communicate about it with an adult who might also have that knowledge. And it's important that it's equitable, because a lot of this language gets kept right for the people who already have resources. So my strong hope is that kids could equitably have access to this type of language and ways to explain their behaviors and understand, like you said, their behaviors, so that they develop a practice in life of not reacting to how they're already behaving and feeling, but actually recognizing that a certain amount of that is in their control. I hope that's the conversation that's happening in circle times all over the country or the world, right? I hope that we're helping these kids understand what's happening earlier. I wish I knew that when I was 10, 14, et cetera, you know, or younger.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 27:49

Looking ahead, what impact do you hope the book will have on children's mental health education and how do you see it contributing to anxiety management in educational settings?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 27:59

I hope that both adults and children and teens can be less in reactive mode and more in protective factor mode because of building trust and aligning in what's happening in the brain. When we connect brain and body, we really set kids up on a path for greater success. And the feedback I've gotten about the book are things like I bought it for my child or my student or my grandchild, but then I read it and things made sense to me and I didn't know, I didn't understand that that was what was happening in me.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 28:39

So you're not only educating the child, exactly yeah, you're educating the adults as well.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 28:44

Together and in that shared understanding there's trust that's built, and we know that trust between a child and an adult is a protective factor for life.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 28:55

So it sets up also the parent and the child for a little bit of bonding, because they're understanding each other's emotions and why it's happening, a little bit better maybe. So then, if the child is witnessing the parent, maybe even be upset, maybe they're going to understand with a little more empathy as well.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 29:12

Yeah, there's language attached to it. Then right, I've had kids say to an adult my amygdala is doing pushups, it's really energized. And then the parent says you're what? And then there's a conversation. And then a child has also come to me and said my parents amygdala was really in threat response mode, so it's. They're attaching that understanding, that language to it and using the vocabulary to try to explain.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 29:43

Yeah, giving children that vocabulary and that language is empowering to them. Yes, because they understand it.

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 29:50

That's right, and so much about the fear response and anxiety overall is about control. It gives you agency a sense of control that you might not have had before and so absolutely I think that that broadly helps to reduce the threat response over time.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:08

Yeah, Wonderful Well. Thank you so much, anna, for sharing your insights and expertise with us today. It's been an enlightening conversation. What's the best way for someone to connect with you or learn more about your work?

Dr. Anna Housley Juster: 30:21

So people can go to annahousleyjuster. com where there is a way to email me. If you'd like to reach out, I'd love to hear from you. The book is available at independent bookstores in various areas and also on Amazon or from the publisher, Teacher Created Materials. So I hope that if you check it out, that you like it, and I hope it's helpful.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:44

Yeah, and I'll put all that information in the show notes as well. Great, thank you so much. As educators and parents, we each have a role to play in supporting children's emotional well-being. I hope today's discussion has inspired you to explore new ways of helping children understand and manage their anxiety, whether it's through storytelling, open conversations or practicing coping strategies. Together, every action counts in building our children's emotional resilience and creating a solid foundation for their learning and growth. Emotional resilience and creating a solid foundation for their learning and growth.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 31:16

If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at lisa@ drlisahassler. com, or visit my website at www. drlisahassler. com and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.