The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  When you listen and attune closely, you’ll remember that what you want most for your children — above any superficial achievement — is to be fulfilled. When you can step out of the culture’s obsession with achievement and perfection and instead step into the commitment of seeing your children for who they actually are, you’ll quickly notice their unique spark, their wiring, their way of moving through the world.

  In my opinion, one of the primary tasks of parenting is to mirror back and support your child’s interests, to notice what lights them up, and then pour energy into supporting that spark, whatever it is. When I’m working with new parents, I encourage them to “watch for the spark,” to pay close attention to those activities that capture their child’s attention and imagination. And I have no doubt that every single child has places or activities or books or people or subjects that light them up.

  For example, I’m amazed when I look at pictures from my older son’s first two years of life and see him doing things like opening and shutting the zipper on a suitcase to figure out how it worked. His engineering mind appeared by age one and was fully apparent at eighteen months old. And I’m fascinated by how different our second son’s interests are, which also showed themselves early in life.

  If you watch closely, you will see your child’s spark. The key is to get your own agenda out of the way so that you can clearly see what’s before you. If you have a desire for your daughter to be a dancer, but she clearly shows interest in science, you may miss the science clues altogether if your vision is clouded by your own desires. It’s a powerful psychological truth that children live out the unlived lives of their parents on many levels, so we must do our best to carefully attend to our own latent desires so that we don’t impose those on our kids. Sometimes just naming it helps move it from the unconscious realm to the conscious. By saying aloud, “You know, I feel so sad that I didn’t pursue my passion for dance,” you can own it and, by doing so, free your child to live their own life.

  The third antianxiety medication for parents is to focus on the long view. Parenting is a long road, yet it’s easy to become caught up in the immediate anxieties that are consuming you. When your baby resists the car seat and treats it like a torture chamber, it can be helpful to look at older children and realize that all kids learn to tolerate being in the car. When your toddler struggles with potty training, it can be helpful to remember that everyone eventually learns to use the toilet; you won’t have a middle schooler in diapers! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been anxious about my kids doing or not doing something, only to realize a few months later that that particular issue has passed.

  Taking the long view alleviates anxiety that stems from a culture that tells you that everything has to happen on a particular timeline. When you shuck off this arbitrary timeline, waves of spaciousness open up inside of you, which in turn reverberate positively to your child. Yet in our culture, which pushes comparisons and expectations of success at every turn, this is easier said than done.

  The race to achieve and succeed begins early. From learning to sit up, crawl, walk, and talk, the first two years are defined by developmental milestones. We may not consciously subscribe to the cultural race to be the biggest, fastest, smartest, and best, but when your baby doesn’t walk until sixteen months or talk until two (or later), it’s difficult not to fall prey to the insidious belief that something’s wrong, followed by the more insidious anxiety that ensues. Conversely, when your baby crawls at seven months and is saying their first words before their first birthday, it’s difficult not to secretly ascribe significance to these developments and assume they mean that your baby is more intelligent than others in their age group.

  The truth is that none of those milestones have any correlation to intelligence, and when we buy into this story, we easily fall into the pit of anxiety. From talking to learning how to swim and read, weaning to sleeping through the night, we rush and sometimes push our babies and children to learn and compete, often before they’re ready. A child-led parenting style means watching and listening to your child’s cues while sensitively, in conjunction with your own needs as a parent, allowing the child to determine the timing of as many events as possible. Again, when you can step out of the cultural expectations regarding what’s “normal” and instead listen to and trust your child’s rhythm, your anxiety will decrease.

  The story that always comes to mind when I’m talking about timelines and rhythm is about my older son learning to swim. I took him to swimming lessons every summer from the time he was four through six, but he usually lasted one lesson, and then would look at me and say, “Mommy, I told you I’m going to teach myself to swim.” Still, I persisted, and still he resisted and insisted that he would teach himself. Sure enough, his first time in the pool the summer he turned nine, he dove underwater and emerged with an ecstatic grin on his face, then proceeded to swim beautifully across the pool. “I told you, Mommy!” It was a celebratory day for everyone.

  Along these lines, I’ll never forget when my well-meaning neighbor observed my seven-year-old boy riding his bike with training wheels and said, “He’s still not riding on two wheels?” His kids, several years younger, had been riding a bike for many years. I can’t even recall when my oldest learned to ride a bike, but what I do know is that it was a joyous moment determined by his own readiness. What does it really matter if a child learns to ride a two-wheeler at age four, seven, or nine?

  Weaning, swimming, riding a bike, learning to read. What’s the rush? Why do we culturally transmit a belief that earlier is better? And the race seems to be running at increasingly higher levels of pressure and intensity. When I was a child, it wasn’t uncommon for kids to learn to swim or ride a bike at the later end of single-digit ages without receiving any social stigma or pressure. Now, if your child isn’t reading, swimming, and riding a bike by the time they leave kindergarten, you all run the risk of being judged. It’s time to slow the pace back down, for our own sake and the sake of kids. When we slow everything down, anxiety takes a breath, and we’re better able to come back into ourselves where our wisdom and clarity live. Every time we practice stepping out of societal expectations and trusting ourselves not only do we take a bite out of anxiety, but we also model self-trust for our kids, which is one of the greatest gifts we can give them.

  Helping Children with Anxiety

  Most of the books on kids and anxiety (and there are dozens since anxiety in young people is on the rise) focus on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) methods for working with anxiety. While I utilize and teach some CBT tools, I also take a different approach, one that seeks to reduce anxiety in children from the outset and help parents understand and meet the core needs when anxiety does arise, just as I do with adults. If we medicate anxiety away, we miss the message. Breathing tools are essential, but they don’t meet anxiety at the root. You have to go deeper, which means helping your kids feel their feelings and making sure they know that they’re fully loved exactly as they are.

  Teaching Kids to Feel Their Feelings

  One of the primary roles as a parent is to teach kids how to soften their hearts and allow themselves to feel their difficult feelings. When my kids were younger, I felt immensely overwhelmed by this task and longed for elders to teach my kids how to work effectively with their sensitivity and channel the big feelings toward creative and spiritual avenues instead of allowing them turn into anxiety. In the absence of guides and through trial and error, eventually I developed the following touchstones to help my kids navigate through the tumultuous and often terrifying feelings of being a small child in a big world, which often revolve around the fear of death.

  Touchstones to Help Children Navigate Their Feelings

  Whenever you see that your child’s pain is causing anxiety, remind him to practice Tonglen, the simple practice of breathing in the pain and breathing out a prayer of love. For example, if he hears sad news, and you see your child rubbing his eyes or trying to stop or control the los
s in some way, say, “What can you do when you feel loss?” With enough reminders, your child will incorporate the practice and develop a habit of moving toward the pain instead of away from it. And when I say “enough reminders,” I mean thousands and thousands. Just like with adults, there are no quick fixes for moving through pain and working with anxiety.

  Spend time every night talking about what made your child feel sad that day. When my son was young, I would hold him on the bed while he unloaded the daily list, which often included snippets of conversations he may have overheard years before. Here’s a sample list from when my older son was about seven years old.

  •The raccoon I saw on the side of the road on our way to the science museum.

  •That people die.

  •That sometimes babies die before they come out of their mommies.

  •A couple of years ago, I heard a neighbor tell you about a girl who drowned.

  •That you and daddy are going to die one day.

  When your child shares her fears, gently rest your hand on her heart and ask her to breathe into the pain. You can say something like, “There’s a lot of pain this world, and there is also so much beauty. One of my jobs as your parent is to teach you that you can handle the pain, because you can. Pain is energy. It hurts to feel it, but it hurts more not to feel it. When you cry, the pain moves through you, and you cleanse your soul. So let’s breathe into the pain, and then say a prayer for the raccoon and the parents of the girl who drowned.” Then talk about all of the happy parts of the day. Here’s another sample list.

  •When Asher made me laugh.

  •When I took care of Asher because his toe was hurting.

  •The beautiful trees.

  •The beautiful full moon.

  •Throwing berries in the creek and catching them downstream.

  •The bees. (He loves bees.)

  As you can see from the first list, most of a child’s fears ultimately boil down to a fear of death, which is extremely common for sensitive kids. When my son would express fear and sadness about me dying one day, I would say to him, “Everest, when it’s my time to die, you’ll be okay. You’ll cry a lot, and it will hurt in your heart, but you’ll be okay. Most likely, I’m not going to die for a long time, and you’ll be a grown man with a partner and kids that you love more than anything in the world. Right now, you love me and Daddy and Asher more than anything, and it’s hard for you to imagine that changing, but it will change. One day you’ll love someone so much that you’ll want to marry that person, just like Daddy wanted to marry me, and you’ll have kids with that person. When I die, your partner will hold you when you cry. You might cry for many weeks, and you might grieve on and off for a year or longer, but you’ll be okay.” I don’t want to set up false hope that I’ll live into old age, but I do want to communicate the message that when I die, he’ll find the comfort and resources to handle it.

  Encourage your child to find their own tools for handling anxiety. One night when my older son was about eight years old, he was trying to fall asleep, and he said, “Mommy, I want to say a prayer for the dead moths that Asher finds.” He then proceeded to whisper the most beautiful, heartfelt prayer I’ve ever heard. In its purity, it was like poetry whispered from the mouth of an angel. Then he wanted to say a prayer for the mice that our new neighbors had recently found, dead and decaying, in the walls of the house that they were renovating. Again, his entire being shifted into a higher frequency when he allowed the words to spontaneously be carried from his heart to his lips, like little lanterns of light. He finished with a big smile on his face and fell asleep more quickly than he had in months.

  Create rituals to acknowledge and contain the loss and rebirth on the solstices and equinoxes. Using these transitional days in the calendar to practice letting go, you can enact rituals like writing down on leaves the things you want to let go of, then sending them down a creek or on the wind. Even simple rituals can help contain and soothe the fear of loss.

  Laugh, dance, tickle, and hug as much as possible. Play and laughter are antidotes to anxiety.

  I offer these tools and touchstones, but the truth is that we don’t exactly know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to raising children. What I can tell you is that by the time my older son became a teenager, he had no fear of death. I mean, zero. In fact, a few days after his fourteenth birthday, he soloed in a glider, literally flying into the sky by himself. The child who was afraid of everything grew into a young man who is afraid of almost nothing. It seemed impossible to imagine when he was younger, and still blows my mind when I think about it. This is what I mean by taking the long view: we simply have no idea how our child will grow and mature, but when we can trust and see a vision of them growing through some of their anxiety (with our loving attention) and leaving it behind, a chunk of our own anxiety about their well-being will be released.

  Fully Loved

  Perhaps one of the most powerful vaccinations against anxiety is to know you are fully loved. One way we can limit anxiety in kids — it might not be entirely preventable given the culture we live in — is to transmit that message daily. This is where your own process of self-reflection and inner work come in, for the more aware you are of your trigger points, the less reactive you’ll be to your child’s less-than-lovely yet totally normal behavior.

  For example, if you haven’t dealt with your own issues around worthiness and performance, you will pass on the inherited beliefs that your job as parents is to mold and shape behavior so that your child becomes a high-achieving, successful member of society. Parents are encouraged to do this by following the advice of a “good job” culture that praises behavior instead of essence, outcome over effort, gold stars and high grades over passion. When Mommy’s face lights up when Billy draws a “perfect” tree but doesn’t when he struggles with basketball, he will naturally direct his energy toward the place where he receives positive feedback. In other words, he may love basketball more than drawing, but Mommy seemed so impressed by his tree, that he pursues an area that isn’t his passion.

  Where this becomes especially damaging is in the realm of big feelings. Mommy smiles when Billy behaves well, which means not making too much noise, not crying, not showing anger, being agreeable and helpful, going to bed on time. She trains him to be a good boy and, in the process, runs the risk of annihilating his essential nature, which may be loud, boisterous, or sensitive. The message he receives is that he’s only loved when he’s good (normal, fits into the mold, agreeable, not too loud or messy).

  As a parent, one of my deepest desires is for my sons to know that they are lovable and loved exactly as they are, no matter how angry, loud, messy, or disrespectful they are. I want them to know that all their feelings are welcome and important. I may not always like their behavior — and I let them know — but it doesn’t alter my love for them, which is unchanging and eternal. I’ll say to them, “I didn’t like how you treated your friend today, but nothing will ever change how much I love you.” The message I hope to impart is: I love you because I love you. I don’t love you because you’re beautiful (even though you are). I don’t love you because you’re creative (although I do reflect back an awareness of your creativity). I love you because I love you. And that will never change no matter what you do.

  PRACTICESEEING YOURSELF THROUGH EYES OF LOVE

  One of the great challenges of parenting is that we inevitably pass on our unhealed places to our kids, and we all have unhealed places, because we’re all human. If we were meant to raise completely healthy people, there would have been a different plan in place, so it can be helpful to trust that when we’re feeling anxious about messing up our kids, this is all part of the plan. In some way that we can’t understand, we’re supposed to mess up our kids in one way or another. When we remember this, a layer of anxiety is eased. It’s not that we’re giving ourselves permission to slack off, but if you’re a parent reading this book, you’re more the type of person to obsess about being a
better parent than you are the type to slack off.

  So as we near the end of this book, we come to another practice of self-love, for the more we love ourselves, the more we will naturally and effortlessly love our children. This is a practice for helping you connect to your essence.

  1.Close your eyes and imagine the most loving person in the world sitting next to you. Perhaps this is a grandmother, living or deceased, who delights in the sight of you, whose smile reflects her unconditional love. Perhaps it’s an animal, a creature that knows you so well and loves you simply because you exist. Perhaps it’s a friend or your partner who gets you completely and has no trouble reflecting back why he or she loves you. This person can be real or imagined, but the energy that they resonate is pure love and unconditional acceptance.

  2.Now imagine that this person is looking into your eyes and can see directly into your soul. She or he wants to tell you what they see: the qualities that describe you; the strands of your being; who you are in your essence. There may or may not be words attached to this description, but through this communication, you receive a direct transmission of who you are and a clear awareness that you are loved because you exist. That you are worthy without having to prove anything. That you are good, enough, and good enough. That you are wholly and completely loved.

  EPILOGUE

  This is the beginning of a road whose end is totally unknown and totally known.