After after a 20 year career and working with hundreds of high achieving, ambitious, driven adolescents and their families,
I Noticed Something
What I kept seeing, both in my clinical practice and in my own community, was a teenager whose anxiety was being driven, in part, by the achievement culture they were living inside of every day. The pressure, the language, the parental anxiety that was transmitting to them in ways nobody was even aware of. And these were loving, invested, genuinely well-intentioned parents, they were parents just like me. They weren't doing anything wrong on purpose. They were doing what our culture tells high-achieving families to do. But the cumulative effect was a teenager running on fear rather than genuine motivation, with no safe place to land when things got hard. And nowhere did this show up more clearly than in the college admissions and sports recruiting process, when years of accumulated pressure came to a head in the highest-stakes season of a teenager's life.
Why? Because so many of these kids fly under the radar. They appear very high functioning on the outside with stellar grades and accolades but the perfectionism and anxiety is eating them up and creating burnout.
Here's Why It’s Difficult And You May Already Know This
It's not because you're doing something wrong. It's because nobody ever taught you what anxiety actually looks like in a high-achieving teenager or how profoundly the environment you create at home is either feeding it or healing it. You've been trying to fix your teen's anxiety from the outside, with better conversations, less pressure, more research while the conditions that are maintaining it have stayed exactly the same. You've felt it. That quiet sense that you're treating the surface and missing something deeper. You're right. You are.
The good news is that once you understand what's actually driving your teen's anxiety and what a healthy achievement culture at home really looks like, everything changes and faster than you'd expect.
Parents who have made this shift describe the same thing: less tension at home, a teen who starts opening up instead of shutting down, and a relationship that finally feels like a team again. If you're ready to stop guessing and start with something that actually works, the training below will show you exactly how to get there.
CLICK THE LINK TO BEGIN
Raising Healthy Achievers: A Parent’s Guide to High Achievement Without the Anxiety
I've Made A Free 30-minute Video Where I'm Teaching Parents of High Achieving Teens Some of The Warning Signs of Anxiety and What To Do About It.
And For Those Of You Who Are Wondering About My Background
Here's My Specific Experience
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Licensed Clinical Psychologist with a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology with 20+ years in private practice
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Spent two decades specializing in high-achieving, anxious teenagers, the kids who look fine on the outside and are struggling on the inside
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Recognized as an adolescent clinical expert by national media, consultant for an A&E Network documentary series and NBC News
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Community speaker and educator on teen anxiety and mental health for high-achieving families
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Head clinician for adolescent outpatient program at a Behavioral Healthcare Hospital in San Diego, ran groups and conducted family sessions
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The tools in this program are ones I use in my clinical office every week and in my own home every day
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Lifetime Member of American Psychological Association
