A Parent’s Guide to Moving Through the Worry
“If I die a sudden death in a car accident, who’s going to tell [my twins] about tampons and predatory pubescent boys?”
This piece was originally published in Anxy Magazine’s email edition March 16, 2017. Sign up now and never miss a story.
I feel my worry in my body. It’s a clamp on my heart, a thud in my stomach. It can rouse me from sleep in the middle of the night, my mind whirring like a hummingbird:
Are they getting enough calcium? Will someone hurt them? Will they get a disease from a toilet seat that I can’t be there to wipe down? Will their sense of self stay true and strong? How will they navigate their teens? What if they can’t find a job? Will they be happy? And breathe…
As a parent, being responsible not only for the survival of little humans but for their everlasting safety and happiness is a daunting, exhausting, impossible thing. I was curious about the scale of these worries, how they morph as kids age, and how people who seem so put together — on Instagram at least — manage to keep calm. So I decided to ask half a dozen mothers and fathers and one grandmother about their experiences. (To be fair, no one I talked to is worried about meeting basic needs like food and shelter; that dimension surely would warrant different treatment.)
What I found is that existential angst is on par with mundane thoughts; outsized fears do battle with real stuff happening right now. Everything feels deeply important and yet much of it is beyond our control. It would be poetic if it weren’t so terrifying.
“My parental anxiety comes from my own experiences.”
— Mother to an 8-year-old girl
What I worry about: “As an older parent, I used to worry about something happening to me and her not having her parents around for long. I have recently come to terms with this since my family is very involved in her upbringing and I know she will be ok without us. The other things that keep me up at night are social dynamics at school and what I can do to help her navigate her teens, from social media and sex to drinking and friendships. Much of my parental anxiety comes from how I was raised and my own experiences; that chaos makes me want to fix everything and have it be right.”
How I cope: “I listen to anxiety mantras, and I meditate and exercise every day. I read a lot and find it helpful to talk to other moms and share anecdotes, tips, and stories, and to just listen. Many people look like they have it together, but everyone has some anxiety about something.”
“The key is to not take anything personally.”
— Father to a 14-year-old boy and 17-year-old girl
What I worry about: “I worry about how the kids will get along in the world. Will they find love? Will they be able to transition to life at college successfully? Are they passionate about life? Will they ever understand how much I care for them and is it even important that they know that? Have I succeeded, have I failed? Will the two of them care for each other as adults? Will the world be safe for them and their children and their children’s children? Should I have put a greater emphasis on sports? I worry about a lot of things, and it has become more acute and deeper with time.
With older kids, there is a definite loss of innocence, a breaking away. Adolescence and puberty make it harder to connect at the same level. You start to worry if the same character flaws that you might see in yourself or your spouse are present in your children. Teenagers get depressed, they cry a lot, they are angry, and they have opinions — often about you as a person. Sometimes you are the enemy, and things can get very dramatic very quickly. One day, taking a family trip to the library sounds like a great idea for all parties involved; the next day, the idea of being in a public place with your father is abhorrent.The key to all of this, which sometimes feels so absurd, is to not take anything personally. Which is practically impossible, right? You raise these kids from day one and if there is something wrong, it’s obviously your fault as a parent. But that’s not true, in the same way that their successes are not your successes. They are their own people.”
How I cope: “Um, Xanax? Maybe a more helpful answer is that I see a therapist regularly. Almost all of the time is spent talking about parenting. We also got a dog instead of a third child (an excellent plan — the dog never asks me to skip songs I like). I can honestly say that, emotionally, these teenage years are definitely the most difficult thing I’ve dealt with as a parent. The kids are in the process of pulling away and identifying as their own people. Which is beautiful and amazing, and the kind of pride you feel in them when they succeed at something is just overwhelming. But there is a lot of just having faith: faith that they can get around the city with friends, faith that they are making smart decisions without you. Like finding any sort of peace with anything, you have to learn how to let go of fear.”
“Filter out what’s about your kids versus what’s about you.”
— Father to a 4-year-old boy and 7-year old girl
What I worry about: “A lot of my worry has to do with physical danger, but lately it’s been more about their sibling rivalry and feeling that we’re not doing something right there as parents. I also worry about their school and making sure they have good teachers.”
How I cope: “Moving dangerous things out of the way. I try to teach them how to be aware of stuff, people. We have conversations about sexual abuse and when it’s ok to touch. It’s important to filter out what’s about your kids versus what’s about you. It’s not healthy for kids to be subject to your anxiety unless it’s actually protecting them. A lot of our levels of anxiety have to do with how well we’ve slept and if we’re exercising enough, so being on top of that is really important.”
“Life isn’t perfect. Our kids will be just fine if their Brownie badge isn’t ironed on correctly.”
— Mother to 8-year-old twins
What I worry about: “Sometimes I worry about the big things, like something happening to one of my children. Or I could be laying in bed thinking about my sudden death in a car accident. Who’s going to tell them about tampons and predatory pubescent boys? But mostly it’s the small, controllable elements of parenting that seem to engender the most sleep deprivation. How much sugar was in that cereal? Why can’t I get my act together to book piano lessons? Shit, I forgot to iron on the patches to their Brownie vest! Or worse, I remembered but was too tired to do it.
With twins, there’s always the worry that one child’s security will lead to the other child’s insecurity. When someone compliments one child, I always feel like I need to make the other child feel included. On a rational level, I understand that they are individuals and have different strengths.”
How I cope: “I have stopped drinking coffee and started exercising. I read more and watch less late-night TV. While those anxious moments always pop up, they don’t completely take over. If I have something swirling in my brain, I write it down in my notebook. Life isn’t perfect and our kids will be just fine if their Brownie badge isn’t ironed on correctly. In fact, letting them understand that you’re not superwoman is good for them. I am learning to let things go a little and focus on the now.”
“The bad bits will shape them just like the good bits.”
— Mother to a 6-year-old boy and 8-year-old girl
What I worry about: “Most of the time, I worry about physical stuff — that they might get hurt in an accident. I also worry about their self-esteem and whether they’ll be confident when they grow up. Now that I have an 8-year-old, she’s starting to take in what society thinks about her.”
How I cope: “The anxious nighttime worry I just have to shake off. There’s only so much I can do as a parent and overprotecting our kids is not good either. Having things happen to them that are not great is part of how they become great people. They learn empathy. The bad bits will shape them just like the good bits and make them well-rounded people.”
“As a parent, you are never totally free from worry, but it doesn’t have to consume you.”
— Mother to four, grandmother to eight
What I worry about: “The most intense worries usually concern safety and not knowing where they are, especially in the teen years when they started driving and dating. The anxiety changed as we matured as parents. The first worry is, are the babies breathing? But with experience comes knowledge, and worries seem to expand with time. With the oldest ones, we didn’t worry as much as we did with the youngest ones. It was a simpler time and we seemed to have fewer fears. The parental worries were more intense than the grandparent ones, due to What I worry about:wisdom of age. We realize some things are not worth worrying about.”
How I cope: “Deadlines. If school was out at 2:45, I expected to see him coming down the street at 3. If not, I started walking toward the school. I was probably a borderline helicopter parent. It did help to know the names of their friends and where they lived; stay involved in your child’s activities. Most kids today have access to a cell phone and that does wonders for anxiety. I have all the grown kids and all the grandkids’ numbers posted and programmed, communication is great and distraction helps control anxiety. As a parent, you are never totally free from worry, but it does not have to consume you. Kids pick up on everything, and it’s important not to pass along your anxiety.”
“It is crazy town to me that we don’t have a ritualized form of hygiene for our minds.”
— Father to a 13-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl
What I worry about: “Day to day, I worry about them getting hit while riding a bicycle — that’s probably the one that’s the most visceral. The wake-me-up-in-the-night kind of worry is more about their future happiness: whether or not the things that I’ve done or neglected to do have set them up well.
As my kids have grown older, I learned that most of my worries in the short term were just wrong. I went through a bunch of ‘movies’ in my head and thankfully none of them happened. When our kids were really young, I felt like the Secret Service protecting the president, diving in front of bullets everywhere. I saw 10,000 [dangers] for everyone that really happened. Over time, I’ve realized how much of it is in my head and really has nothing to do with them or any objective reality.
The biggest risk that we have is, we think about all the things we want to pass on to our kids — our values or a set of experiences — but then we find out that they didn’t really experience it the way we did. Or we play them this music and they end up hating it. So the transmission rate is sub-10 percent. But I can tell you with confidence, the thing that does get passed on, with an almost 100 percent transmission rate, is anxiety. And whatever it is you’re worried about, that’s like electricity into your child’s body. So my main mission is to make that basket of anxieties and fears just a little bit smaller than the one I got. There’s a real difference between fear and risk.
How I cope: “I am not a proponent of any particular practice, but it is crazy town to me that in a modern society, where we know to brush our teeth twice a day and see a professional once or twice a year, that we don’t have a ritualized form of hygiene for our minds. I’m talking about taking as much time as brushing your teeth. Write down five things that happened today that really inspired or worried you. And then you can look back over that, and meditate, pray, or just close your eyes and sit. If you do that on a daily basis, I think you’ll find a lot of patterns which turn out to be true, you’ll find out a lot of patterns that turn out to be false, and you’ll leave the future-worry-anxiety state and you’ll probably spend a little bit more time — even just a minute in the morning or a minute in the evening — just being in the present.”
(This last conversation was edited for length but you can listen to the whole thing on Soundcloud.)
Mia Quagliarello is the head of curation and community at Flipboard, blogs for Burning Man, and writes about parenting, music, and life after diapers on her own site, Disco Nap.
