How to Not Be Anxious as a Parent
Parental anxiety is on the rise. This anxiety is understandable, but the degree to which parents are anxious today is neither necessary nor productive. How can you respond?
Parental anxiety is on the rise. A recent survey found that 97% of parents felt stress related to parenting in the past month, and one in four parents feel that stress often. Interestingly, the same survey identified adolescent anxiety as one of the top causes of parental stress.
To a certain extent, this anxiety is understandable. We only worry over what we care about, and there are few things parents care about more than their children. Nevertheless, the degree to which parents are anxious today is neither necessary nor productive.
A psychiatrist might offer a more technical analysis, but my observation is that parental anxiety has three common roots—and understanding them goes a long way toward relief. The first is a misunderstanding of a parent’s role. The second is unreasonable expectations of what good parenting entails. The third is a distorted weighing of the dangers and opportunities that confront our children.
A Parent’s Role
Many parents feel responsible not simply for guiding their children but for guaranteeing outcomes. If a son struggles academically, morally, socially, or spiritually, parents often interpret that struggle as evidence of their own failure.
This misunderstanding creates enormous anxiety because outcomes can never be guaranteed. Your children are free human beings. You can control what you do and how you respond. You can provide structure, encouragement, affection, and your own example. But you cannot take over the will of your child.
The deeper problem is not merely that we cannot control our children—it’s that we often wish we could. If there were some parental version of Minority Report, a way to see every future mistake and intervene before it occurred, many parents would gladly accept it. They would love to stop every bad friendship, every dishonest choice, every moral failure before it happened. That desire to take the wheel is itself a source of anxiety.
Parents should love their children as God loves us, which means loving their children’s freedom, even knowing that freedom will entail mistakes and messiness. God created Adam and Eve with freedom, knowing well that they would abuse it. He “takes this risk,” as C. S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters, “because He has a curious fantasy of making [us] His ‘free’ lovers.”
Unreasonable Expectations
A second major cause of parental anxiety is an unreasonable expectation of perfection.
No one would say this out loud—because doing so would immediately reveal its absurdity—but many parents carry a tacit assumption that they should be capable of always saying the right thing, always making the right decision, always intervening at exactly the right moment. This, of course, is impossible. You bring into parenting the same limitations and defects you had before your children arrived. Expecting to make many mistakes is not pessimism but realism; it is the only reasonable stance and, paradoxically, it is a source of peace.
The same principle applies to our expectations of children. Boys are works in progress. Their wills are not yet strong enough, and their prefrontal cortexes not yet developed enough, to consistently master their passions. Our judgments of them should reflect this reality. Expecting complete consistency, discipline, prudence, or self-mastery from adolescents is unrealistic.
Growth is a game of inches and is rarely linear. Celebrate small wins. Don’t dwell on setbacks, which are often temporary anyway.
It’s also worth remembering that the target is constantly moving. What works in one stage will not necessarily work in another. A seventh-grader may enthusiastically clean the cafeteria floor in exchange for a free lunch. An eighth-grader may suddenly decide that such an arrangement makes no sense because he can get lunch either way. The same tactics do not work in different stages. Parents often interpret these shifts as failures when, in reality, they are normal developments in growth and temperament.
Perception of Risk and The Anxiety Formula
One useful way to think about anxiety is this: anxiety equals the perception of danger divided by the perception of opportunity. When perceived danger rises and perceived opportunity shrinks, anxiety spikes. If you focus entirely on the numerator—magnifying every potential risk while minimizing every potential opportunity—your anxiety will go through the roof.
The antidote is realism. Yes, there are dangers. A boy may struggle academically, make poor moral choices, drift spiritually, or waste opportunities. These are real risks. But they are, at most, half of the picture. If you want to be truly realistic, you need to spend as much energy—if not more—imagining how beautifully things might unfold. History is full of people who struggled while young but flourished as adults.
Persevere
Because children take time to grow—and because parents take time to figure out how to help them grow—perseverance may be the most important virtue in parenting. Good parenting is not the elimination of mistakes. It is fidelity over time. And peace comes from realizing that there is still time.
As parents, you have to be coaches of second-half players. Your sons will make mistakes. They will end up in situations you wish they hadn’t. When that happens, there are two ways to respond. One is anger and frustration. But the other response is the optimism of knowing that the mistake is done—it cannot be changed—and that now is the moment for opportunity. Discipline is necessary, but the best discipline teaches your son to respond well to his mistakes. The question is: What is the best way for my son to get out of this mess? Where is the victory? Where is the opportunity?
There is a beautiful passage from Leif Enger’s debut novel, Peace Like a River, that captures parental fidelity especially well. The story centers on a good, saintly father. After one particularly painful episode, one of the boys asks his dad, “What are we going to do?” The father’s answer is a single word: persevere.
That’s it. What do you do when things go wrong? Persevere. Persevere in prayer. Persevere in love. Persevere in hope. Persevere in being there.
Fantastic -- and the quote from Peace Like a River at the end. That book is an incredible read on the gift of fatherhood. Thank you for sharing and giving me much to think about.
Thank you for this, practical advice and insightful!