Q&A: Back-to-School Survival Guide

Hello, and welcome to the questions and answers edition of Thriving Kids, a podcast from the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children with mental health and learning disorders.

I'm Dr. Dave Anderson, clinical psychologist and your host.

This week, we're changing a couple things up.

First, we're gonna start broadening the format of our Q&A podcast episodes.

So in the past, we've kind of done this artificial thing, a little square peg in a round hole kind of phenomenon, where we've tried to answer questions from listeners that are along the same theme as the previous guest featured podcast episode.

What we've noticed, though, is that when we solicit questions from our listeners, listeners basically just ask questions that are on their mind.

They may not have watched the most recent episode, even though I wish everyone would, but they may not have watched the most recent episode, and so they're asking a much wider set of questions just on the topics of most concern to them.

So what we are gonna do is we're gonna start grouping any listener-submitted questions, and once we get kind of a critical mass of questions around any certain topic, we're then just going to create a QN episode-- Q&A episode around that topic.

So we want you to know we're of course continuing to accept any and all questions from listeners.

You can submit them through our Instagram accounts on @thrivingkidspod and @drdaveanderson, also @childmindinstitute.

You can submit them on TikTok.

You can submit them through our Facebook.

You can submit them on YouTube in comments on our videos.

Uh, you can submit them on our website, childmind.org.

Submit them anywhere you like, and we will try to group them together and find ways to thematically get back to you on the topics that most concern you.

The other piece that we're gonna change about Q&A episodes, as many of you have heard me describing, uh, our producer, Chad Garber, in studio when we're, uh, doing podcast episodes, uh, his various emotional, uh, reactions to parts of the episode, the ways he might relate it to his own life, things like that.

And you might think to yourself, "Who is Chad Garber? Who is this mystery man?" And the key here is we are pulling back the curtain, and at least for Q&A episodes, we wanna make them a little bit more like a dialogue.

And so we're gonna have Chad actually start asking me the questions.

And as we go forward, you know, we'll see how this evolves.

So this week, I'm going to answer nine questions around the theme of back to school.

This is an episode that's gonna be released right as we go back to school here in 2026.

So with that, let me just say, Chad, say hi.

Dave, hi.

There we go.

Everyone.

This is our producer, Chad Garber, our new question asker and dialogue partner on these podcast episodes.

Let's get into it.