Kimberly Hillyer, DNP, NNP-BC

Dr. Hillyer: How would you hashtag your book? 

Erica Komisar: I would probably hashtag it as #teen parenting. Hashtags are usually no more than two words, so it’s a little tough because it would be #adolescent mental health, but you could do #teen parenting or #parenting or #mental health or #kids mental health. Those would be my hashtags. 

Dr. Hillyer: If you had not decided upon this title (Chicken Little the Sky Isn’t Falling) for your book, what would have been another title? 

Erica Komisar: I had another title it was “Second Chances,” and it didn’t go over, but I liked it because I think of adolescence as parents’ second chance. If you miss the first critical window of brain development, it’s a second chance to influence your children in terms of the future and their future mental health and emotional security. 

Dr. Hillyer: How many pages did you write on your very first day? 

Erica Komisar: Oh boy, I am an impulsive writer, so that’s an interesting question. I can write 50 pages in three hours. I mean, I can just once I start going. So, I can’t remember to be honest, how many pages I wrote on the first day. When I get going, as my collaborator, who’s an editor, basically she takes my writing Sid Miner, she’s wonderful, and she says, “You know, you just kind of vomit on the page, and then I sort through it.” 

Dr. Hillyer: So that’s funny, but that’s very amazing. I could have used you for my Doctorate of Nursing Practice. 

Can you tell me who your book is dedicated to? 

Erica Komisar: My book is dedicated to my own children. I have three children; they are twenty-two, twenty, and seventeen. I have two sons and a daughter, and they are my inspiration for all the parenting books I write. And my husband who has supported my career and is my hero in many ways. 

Dr. Hillyer: How did you come up with the design for your cover? 

Erica Komisar: Well, that’s easy. They give you two from the publisher, and they usually give one that’s not so good and one that’s great and that they make it easy for you. Actually, it was a discussion because the cover had to be optimistic. There was one cover that was kind of the sky being dark, and there was another cover that they sent me, which is the cover of the book, which was skies and balloons and sunshine. The truth is that this book is hopeful. It’s a hopeful book, it does have a lot of depressing statistics, and it is meant to shake parents up, but it’s a hopeful book. There’s something you can do, and that’s hopeful. 

Dr. Hillyer: I think what I really appreciated about your book is that it didn’t leave you off in a place of continued anxiety or despair. You are actually giving us tools. Tools that we could use, so I did appreciate that, and now I can see why you chose that cover. It was perfect. 

Dr. Hillyer: How many times have you read your book? 

Erica Komisar: That’s a hard question. I have read chapters of my book thousands of times, literally thousands of times. Altogether, the whole book together, probably two or three times. As you put a book together, you work on it chapter by chapter, and I can tell you, chapter by chapter, we have looked at those chapters a thousand times. 

Dr. Hillyer: How do you get the flow of which chapter goes where? Because it was really thoughtful in my mind and made sense of why you started first with helping us (parents) understand the current age of anxiety. Then building up into the understanding of the brain of an adolescent, then breaking each area down. I thought it was really thoughtful and then to come back around and then to help guide us as parents. 

Erica Komisar: You have to introduce what the book is about, which is this is a particular time in history this new age of anxiety. I always like to talk about health first, again, because you have to have a baseline of knowledge as a parent of what health looks like. What does mental health look like? What does emotional security look like? What should it look like? Because there’s a lot of challenges to childhood into adolescence, it’s full of adversity, and it’s full of trauma, too. That’s part of normal trauma. You know, people don’t think of trauma as normal, but adolescence is a kind of trauma because there’s so many crazy things happening to your body and your mind and socially. So, you have to have a baseline of what’s normal, and then from there, you can talk about when things go awry. So that’s sort of how I organized the book, and I organized my last book (Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matter) that way too. 

Dr. Hillyer: Now that your book is published, is there another chapter you wish you had added? 

Erica Komisar: I probably would have added another chapter about how COVID-19 has amplified the mental health crisis. This book came out now, but really it’s been in the process. You know books take a long time to get published. It was finished when COVID wasn’t really nearly as bad or at the very beginning. So yeah, I would say that I would probably add a chapter about COVID. 

Disclosure: The author has no disclosures. 

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