Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. The My castaway this week is Professor Tanya Byron. She has spent the past 20

odd years in clinical practice helping children, young people and families deal with some of the

most difficult parts of life, depression, anxiety, aggression, self-harming and drug addiction.

She came to public prominence through her television work, books and advice

columns and it would seem she had the perfect background to cope with life as a clinician

in the spotlight. Her father was a successful TV and theatre director. Her mother worked variously as a

nursing sister and a model. It was a highly dramatic family tragedy that ignited her

interest in what spurs people to behave the way they do.

She says of her work, I do have a particular desire to enable young people on the

cusp of what could be the most extraordinary life to live and live well.

So, Tanya Barnes, through the work you do in your advice column weekly in The Times and certainly

through the work you've done on television you're very well known for giving

parents advice especially advice about younger children and your kids are

teenagers now but but when they were much younger were you able to take your

own advice were you able to implement the strategies that you tell other people to?

Can you imagine how messed up my kids would be if I had been a psychologist instead of a mother?

You know, I think being a practitioner didn't necessarily make me into a better mother.

I think being a mother helped me be a better practitioner because certainly you empathize with

the trials and tribulations of parenting when you're one yourself. I remember once being in a public

...