Houston Moms in the Middle

Nicole Humlicek has spent 20 years in classrooms and school hallways, and she'll tell you that tweens and middle schoolers are her favorite people on earth. Complications and all. She sat down with Brandi for this episode of Houston Moms in the Middle to talk about the thing so many of us are quietly struggling with: how to have a real conversation with a kid whose entire vocabulary has shrunk to "fine," "good," and a shrug.

With Houston kids settling back into the school year, the daily "how was your day?" is about to get a lot of mileage, and Nicole, the upper school principal at The Honor Roll School, has a better option. She walks through “Rose, Thorn, Spaghetti,” a predictable little framework that trades rapid-fire interrogation for something kids will actually answer, and explains why letting them rename the parts makes them buy in. She also gets into what's happening under the hood at this age, comparing a developing prefrontal cortex to driving I-10 mid-construction, which lands especially well if your house happens to have a teenager and a perimenopausal mom swinging through hormones at the same time. Then there's the harder stuff: why coming in hot gets you scorched earth, why our instinct to fix things fast usually backfires, and how modeling an apology to your own kid often gets you one back.

Nicole points parents toward the family resources page at The Honor Roll School, where the school shares its own podcasts and a recommended reading list for families raising this age group.

This conversation is a reminder that we can't control what our kids say or do… but we can always control how we show up for the conversation that comes next.

We grew up comparing ourselves to pop stars and magazine covers. Our daughters are comparing themselves to a filtered, algorithm-fed scroll that never ends. So how do we break the cycle instead of passing it down?

In this episode of Moms in the Middle, host Brandi Smith sits down with therapist Elizabeth Westbrook to talk about moms, daughters, and body image. Elizabeth is the owner of The Reclaimed Collective, a licensed clinical social worker, certified neuropsychotherapist, certified mediator, court-appointed parent facilitator, and a mom of four. She's candid about her own history with disordered eating and what it meant for her kids to watch her walk through it.

Together, Brandi and Elizabeth get into the small, doable shifts that actually move the needle: why our own body talk matters more than we realize, how to spot the offhand comments worth following up on, why the praise we give our kids shapes where they anchor their worth, and how to encourage wellness without letting it become an identity.

In this episode:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:00 Meet Elizabeth Westbrook
• 01:30 Thighmaster moms and the standards we inherited03:00 Why kids clock hypocrisy in our body talk
• 04:00 Intrusive thoughts and what to do with them
• 04:30 The "flippant statement" as data
• 05:00 Praise that has nothing to do with their body
• 06:00 When the algorithm turns unhealthy
• 07:30 Elizabeth on her own disordered eating recovery
• 08:35 Encouraging wellness without obsession
• 10:15 Peer groups and being the gathering house
• 11:45 It's not too late to course correct
• 12:50 How to connect with Elizabeth

Connect with Elizabeth Westbrook:Website: https://www.reclaimed-co.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesneakerheadtherapist/The Reclaimed Collective on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.reclaimed.co/

Moms in the Middle is a podcast from the team at Houston Moms for parents navigating the in-between years: tweens, teens, and early adulthood. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

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More from Houston Moms: https://houstonmom.com/

Dr. Alayna Pagnani-Gendron has watched something change over her 15 years in practice: kids are coming in hurting {really hurting} at ages when they simply shouldn't be. If your tween or teen wakes up cracking and popping, complains of headaches, or slouches like their phone is magnetized to their lap, this episode of Houston Moms in the Middle is for you. Dr. Pagnani-Gendron, a certified pediatric chiropractor, sat down with Brandi to explain what's actually going on in our kids' bodies … and why it starts way earlier than that first cell phone.

The conversation gets specific fast. Dr. Pagnani-Gendron describes kids waking up with necks so kinked they can't move, a condition she rarely saw in young patients before the screen era and traces it back to years of hunching over iPads that now start as early as kindergarten. She shares the doable fixes she uses in her own house: a daily body-movement rule, the 45-minutes-on, 15-minutes-off homework structure, and an affordable ball desk chair that sneakily builds posture muscles. She also breaks down how to tell growing pains from something worse, why that 25-pound backpack slung over one shoulder is doing real damage {and the locker strategy that helps}, and the way stress shows up in teen bodies as headaches, fatigue, and mystery stomachaches. Plus, the three supplements she recommends if your picky eater will take nothing else.

Dr. Pagnani-Gendron is the owner of HealthPro Family Chiropractic & Acupuncture in Houston, where she's one of the city's few fully certified prenatal and pediatric chiropractors.

This conversation is a reminder that our kids' aches and pains aren't just part of growing up … and that small, consistent changes at home can spare them a lifetime of chronic pain.