Exploring anxiety: our year with Lynn Lyons

5/28/2025

Mary Gauthier, Executive Director, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Research

Students, staff and parents/guardians have had the opportunity to learn from psychotherapist Lynn Lyons as we explored our relationship with and responses to anxiety during the 2024-2025 academic year.

With a special interest in breaking the generational cycle of worry in families, Lynn is the author/coauthor of several books and articles on anxiety, including Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents: 7 Ways to Stop the Worry Cycle and Raise Courageous & Independent Children, and the companion book for kids, Playing with Anxiety: Casey’s Guide for Teens and Kids. Her latest book for adults and teenagers, The Anxiety Audit, was released October 2022.

Based on Lynn’s professional development workshops, the student sessions and the parents/guardians session, Anthony Costa, VP Student Support and Well Being, Catherine Menard, Coordinator, Student Well Being, and Laura Mincer, Social Worker, share some steps parents/guardians can take to help their teen “get comfortable with discomfort” and build resiliency:

Encourage stepping into challenges, new experiences, and activities, rather than ruminating or avoiding them.
Provide intentional practice with feeling uncomfortable and uncertain rather than implicitly or explicitly attempting to get rid of discomfort and create certainty
Help your students learn the skill of differentiation between when something really needs to be carefully crafted or executed versus when they can take their feet off the gas a bit because worry will otherwise promote everything to an emergency

Lynn’s final session was a recorded message for our students as they wrap up their school year and head into summer. You can view that message on ON by logging in via the website and watch the video posted to the Parent/Guardian Resources tile.

If you have any questions or suggestions for the Parent/Guardian Series, please email mary.gauthier@greenwoodcollege.com.

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Lynn Lyons speaking with students in a session in October 2024.

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