Show Notes
Modern childhood is facing an unprecedented crisis — rising screen time, falling literacy, and overstimulated young minds. In this Family Talk Live event, Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood and Upstart, joined Dr Linda de Caestecker to unpack what’s really going on for children today — and how we can bring back calm, play, and connection. Sue shared insights from decades of research into early development, explaining how rapid cultural and technological change has reshaped childhood. She t...
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Why do we spend so much time trying to control how we feel? And could the constant search for calm sometimes be part of the problem? Psychotherapist and bestselling author Joshua Fletcher joins Lucy Johnstone to explore anxiety, overthinking and the pressures of modern life. Drawing on his own experiences and more than a decade working as a therapist, Joshua explains how the fear of anxiety itself can become a powerful cycle, why we may become caught up in rumination and self-monitoring, and ...
What happens when a young person can no longer live with their parents and someone within their wider family steps in? Bobby Dean shares his own experience of going to live with his grandparents as a teenager and the stability they gave him at a difficult point in his life. Years later, Bobby discovered there was a name for what his grandparents had done: kinship care. In conversation with Humphrey Hawksley, he explores the pressures facing kinship carers, the importance of early support, and...
For decades, depression has often been explained as a chemical imbalance in the brain. Professor Joanna Moncrieff argues that the evidence simply doesn’t support that explanation. In this episode of Family Talk, Lucy Johnston speaks with Joanna about the serotonin theory of depression, what antidepressants actually do and why Joanna believes their effects may be better understood as altering or blunting emotions rather than correcting an underlying abnormality. They discuss the origins of the...
Mirela Zoltan spent the first three years of her life in an orphanage in Romania before being adopted and taken to the United States. What followed was a childhood marked by disrupted relationships and repeated moves through adoptive, foster and residential settings. Mirela was frequently seen as a child with challenging behaviour. Looking back, however, she describes something much simpler underneath it: she wanted to be loved, wanted and listened to. She needed connection and a sense of bel...
Could we one day help identify ADHD by looking at the brain? That is the question at the beginning of this episode of Care Visions Family Talk, in which Lucy speaks with Dr Monica Berntsen, introduced as a practising neuropsychologist who has spent more than a decade working with people with ADHD and autism. The discussion begins with the way ADHD is currently assessed. Dr Berntsen describes existing assessment as heavily subjective and questionnaire-based. She says that what is now kno...