Parenting and Anxiety Blog Series (Part 2)

As discussed last week in our first blog of our Parents and Anxiety Blog series (check it out here if you missed it!), one reason why I believe that parents are much more anxious parenting in our modern world is that we have so much advice and opinions about how to raise our child(ren). Not only do we not have strong foundations of a more central “American” parenting style that we all can believe in, we have what seems like millions of books, blogs, and opinions out there.

For this blog, I wanted to talk about another effect of all of these opinions. Many of these books and articles give the message that if parents just did “x”, their kid would turn out a certain way. For example, if you just phrase your praise correctly, your child will be internally motivated towards rewards. I think the challenge of this is twofold. One, parents have the pressure of feeling that everything that happens for their child is completely under their control as parents. Two, we genuinely seem to believe that we can curate our child. We can decide that there are qualities we want them to have and then almost force them to have them by our own actions and choices.

While I think a lot of this advice is well intentioned and probably extremely helpful, in our competitive world of child rearing, it is also only increasing a sense of anxiety and sense of guilt when things don’t turn out how we had hoped. For example, some children struggle with frustration tolerance and grit even though their parents are doing and saying all the “right” things to help them develop these traits. I meet with parents who are often doing “all the right” things and their children still struggle. Unfortunately, this leads parents to feel a lot of guilt and often, shame, around their child, parenting, and identity as a parent.

The challenge here is that the advice we are getting is usually very general advice that completely ignores the nature component of the nature v. nurture debate. And while as a therapist, I do believe that nurture is very clearly important, I also believe that it is not everything. The way our children are wired really does matter and lead them to make different choices. For example, some children learn well by being told information. Many others just seem to need to learn by doing themselves, or the “hard way” as some adults would call it. All of our personality traits that make us who we are impact our later choices and sometimes, no amount of parenting differently is going to affect that course.

I wanted to discuss this today not because I want to tell parents to stop trying to help their children develop different traits. I want to instead reduce the pressure that the parents might feel to have their children be the gage or report card of their parenting successes. I meet with amazing parents all the time who have children who are struggling. I fundamentally believe that a parent’s success cannot be judged by their children’s success.