The Emotionally Healthy Child with Maureen Healy

Dr. Dan welcomes author and parenting expert Maureen Healy of Growing Happy Kids.com to discuss her new and inspiring book The Emotionally Healthy Child: Helping Your Child Calm, Center, and Make Smarter Choices.

Growing up has never been easy, but today’s world presents kids and their parents with unprecedented challenges.  The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 25 percent of children experience anxiety and 14 percent have a mood disorder, and National Public Radio shared that as many as five million public school students have mental-emotional issues such as depression and anxiety.  Today Dr. Dan talks to award-winning author and international speaker Maureen Healy about emotional health and much more.

In her book The Emotionally Healthy Child, Maureen Healy explains that emotional health is the ability identify emotions and to make better choices, even when feeling anger or another big emotion. She explains to Dr. Dan that the ability to — Stop, Calm, and Make a Smarter Choice — are key to expressing emotions constructively.  During today’s podcast interview listeners will hear about what children need to know, what children need to do, and what speeds up the process of emotional health. 

In addition, Dr. Dan and Maureen Healy discuss what age to start working on emotional health, the feeling brain vs. the thinking brain, mindfulness tools, the inspiring words the Dalai Lama wrote about Maureen’s book ( “I hope Maureen Healy’s book – The Emotionally Healthy Child – will contribute to a more wholesome education for future generations”), her studies with happiness teachers globally, the concept of wholeness, and much more — including Maureen’s Parent Footprint Moment.

Maureen Healy is an award-winning author, speaker and leader in the field of children’s emotional health. Maureen writes a popular blog for Psychology Today and her first book Growing Happy Kids won the Nautilus and Readers’ Favorite book awards.

With over fifteen years of years of experience, Maureen has counseled thousands of parents and their children, worked with educators globally, taught in the classroom, and given keynote talks throughout North America, Europe and Asia. She’s also appeared across all media outlets including AOL’s “The Fatherhood Project” with Hank Azaria, Forbes.com and Scholastic magazine.

Maureen’s earned a BA and MBA from Clark University in Worcester, MA and a PhD in Child Clinical Psychology at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA.