Our anxiety is seeping into our kids. Children don’t need perfect parents, but they do benefit greatly from parents who can serve as a nonanxious presence. When we are not unduly stressed, worried, angry, or tired, we are much better able to comfort an infant, handle the behavioral challenges of young children, and respond to our teenager’s limitations without impulsively saying or doing something hurtful. When we can be a nonanxious presence for our children, we do a world of good—just by not freaking out. In fact, a recent study showed that other than showing your child love and affection, managing your own stress is the best thing you can do to be an effective parent.2 One first grader’s mom cried every time they talked about his need for tutoring, so he told her, “Mom, you’re going to have to get it together before we have these talks.”
We recognize what a quandary we’ve presented you with. First, we push you out of your comfort zone, encouraging you to give your kids more control over their lives when that’s likely the very thing that makes you anxious. And now we’re telling you you’d better calm down about it. Put that way, it just sounds mean. But we have no intention of leaving you without tools and a way forward. So this chapter is intended not only to help you understand why being a nonanxious presence is so important, but to show you how to do it. Because here’s the thing: you can’t fake it.
Trickle-down Anxiety
Bad news first: anxiety tends to run in families. Up to 50 percent of children of anxious parents develop anxiety disorders themselves. This may make you think that if you have anxiety, even if it’s treated, your kid is screwed.
That’s not necessarily true. Kids come into the world with different susceptibilities to anxiety. Some aren’t bothered by it—scientists call kids like this “dandelion children.” Like dandelions, they’re fairly impervious to their environment. Others are “orchid children,” with a very high biological sensitivity to context. They are particularly sensitive to the parenting they receive. They flourish under parenting that is calm and nurturing, and struggle with parenting that is high strung. There are both positive and negative aspects to parenting orchid children. Though sensitive children are more susceptible to a negative environment, they also thrive in a calm and loving environment.3
One of the ways we pass on anxiety to our kids is through something called epigenetics, a new field that is still only partially understood. Epigenetics refers to the ways that experience affects genes by turning the function of specific genes on or off. So while children may be born with some genetic predisposition, it takes experiences to “turn on” the specific genes that ignite depression or anxiety.
Turning these problematic genes to the “on” position is all too easy to do, and it can happen in at least two ways:
1. Secondhand stress
There are some people whose presence just makes you nervous. For adults, it could be an overbearing boss, a perfectionist in-law, or a colleague who is constantly in panic mode. For kids and teens, it might be a strict teacher, that friend fretting about every last assignment, or, well, you.
Stress is catching, like an emotional virus. That may sound kind of kooky, but there’s considerable evidence for what scientists call “stress contagion.” Just like a cold—or a plague—stress spreads through a contained population, affecting and infecting everyone in its path. Who hasn’t worked in an infected office and felt the debilitating effects of just one permanently stressed-out person? We all know that one family member can spread anxiety around the house until everyone is on edge.4
So-called secondhand stress can linger even longer than your own personal stress. Seen through the lens of control, this makes perfect sense. Stress most often results from feeling a low sense of control over events or the environment we live in, and the less control we experience, the more stressed we feel. If your sister thinks the mole on her arm might be cancerous, you feel justifiably anxious for her. What you can’t do is force her to go to a dermatologist and have a biopsy to settle your fears. Her stress, while significant, is at least partially under her control. But you can’t act to mitigate your own stress about the mole.
From the time babies are in the womb, they are influenced by their environment and sensitive to our stress. From then and throughout the early years of life, if a child’s parents are highly stressed, the child’s genes are affected—including genes involved in insulin production and brain development. Stress effects the gene expression of the fetus and young infants through a process called methylation. A certain type of chemical (called a methyl group) “locks” the gene that’s supposed to turn off the stress response in the on position.5 Changes in gene expression can continue to be seen right through adolescence.6
While stress in utero and in the first year of life have the most decisive impact on the developing brain, recent studies have shown that secondhand stress persists. For example, when parents are anxious about math, their kids are more likely to be anxious about math, too, but only if the anxious parents often help with the homework.7 In other words, if you have math anxiety, your kid is probably better off if you don’t offer your help. It works the other way, too. When your kid is upset, your amygdala reacts, which makes it even harder to be calm. This is why so many parents find themselves, ironically and often comically, angrily yelling at their kids for losing their temper.
So how does this happen? Where or how does the virus “catch”?
First, as we talked about in Chapter One, the amygdala senses threat and picks up on anxiety, fear, anger, and frustration in other people. It even picks up fear and anxiety in the smell of stressed people’s perspiration. Second, the prefrontal cortex, the Pilot, includes what are called mirror neurons. As the name suggests, mirror neurons seem to imitate what a person is seeing, which is why they’re important to emotions like empathy. (In people with autism, who have trouble imitating other people, the functioning of these neurons is atypical.) These mirror neurons are what make kids learn through observation, but they also help kids pick up their parents’ anxiety. They will literally mirror what they’re seeing, a process that starts in infancy. When parents of newborns are stressed, the babies cry and fuss more than if their parents are feeling calm and confident.
If you think you can hide your anxiety from your kids, you are deluding yourself. Psychologist Paul Ekman has made it his life’s work to identify and catalogue our thousands of different facial expressions, and while there are many that we make intentionally to show others how we feel, we also have an involuntary expressive system that signals our feelings whether we want to share them or not. In an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, Ekman explained, “You must have had the experience where somebody comments on your expression and you didn’t know you were making it. . . . Somebody tells you, ‘What are you getting upset about?’ ‘Why are you smirking?’” Ekman points out the obvious—that while you can hear your voice, you can’t see your face. “If we knew what was on our face,” he said, “we would be better at concealing it.”8
Kids see what you feel, even if you don’t want them to. Then they mirror those feelings, even if you don’t think you’re projecting them, and they begin to feel those feelings, too. One of the reasons for this is that kids tend to be particularly bad at correctly interpreting what they’re seeing. So whereas an adult might spend the evening in the company of her grumpy spouse and think, “He’s grumpy, but it’s not about me. I think I’ll just leave him be,” a kid is likely to think, “Dad is grumpy. I must have done something wrong. He’s mad at me.” If kids are stressed, that already immature interpretation function goes haywire. Kids are great observers but lousy interpreters. Ned’s daughter, Katie, for instance, consistently perceives that people who are angry near her are angry at her. She is a classic orchid child.
Much of maturity is marked by increased emotional self-regulation. This is when the prefrontal cortex is conscious of what you’re doing and in charge. You can inhibit. But when a kid senses a threat, say, in th
e form of a stressed or grumpy dad, he doesn’t have a fully developed Pilot to say, “No big deal. The bumps will pass, and we’ll just fly at a different altitude in the meantime.” Instead, he panics. His amygdala takes over. And before you know it, he’s stressed and grumpy, too. If this happens too much, his amygdala becomes larger and even more reactive. In Robert Sapolsky’s words, if stress persists for a long time, the amygdala becomes more and more “hysterical.”9
Now imagine the cognitive dissonance experienced when we can tell a person’s words do not match the emotions he’s feeling. As parents, if we are fully attentive, our kids cannot slip “I’m fine” past us when in reality they are not. So, too, we should be careful about telling our kids one thing when we are experiencing another. There’s a concern about telling kids too much and burdening them with emotions they are not prepared to handle, but whatever you do or don’t tell them, be mindful both of your child’s ability to feel your emotions and of her fear, uncertainty, and doubt. In the absence of a story or explanation, people tend to create their own, and often the scenarios kids will come up with are more alarming than the truth.
The mother of a family Ned worked with was diagnosed with cancer. The parents wanted Ned to know, since their sixteen-year-old daughter Ayse, who was temperamentally anxious, was likely to have less support than usual. Her mom needed to attend to her treatment, and her dad would be busy supporting mom, taking care of Ayse’s younger sister, and picking up other roles that her mom had to set down for a while. “But don’t tell Ayse,” they said. “We don’t want her to worry.” Ned sat on that for a while before circling back and expressing concern that Ayse would pick up their worry. She’d spent her entire life reading their faces. It was territory she knew intimately. How could she not notice if something was amiss? What would Ayse think if she could feel something was wrong but her parents swore all was well? That a divorce was pending? That they were upset with her? It’s hard to say. Ultimately, Ayse’s parents did share the illness with her. Knowing what was going on and understanding the course of treatment reduced Ayse’s uncertainty and doubt. It also allowed Ayse to do something. She helped her mom and dad by doing a few more chores and by driving her sister to soccer when her parents couldn’t. The cancer was still scary and, though it is now in remission, it will always be part of their lives, an uncertainty they can never expunge. But knowing and being honest helped them all. By not having two truths—one the parents kept to themselves and one for their kids—the family was in sync, right down to the mirror neuron level.
When my daughter was just over a year old, we went to visit friends in Chicago. On return we were stuck on one of those long ground stops on the tarmac that so often bedevil summer travelers. My daughter, like the rest of us, was not delighted by her circumstances and articulated her displeasure as most infants do, which did little to add to the experience for me or the other couple of hundred lucky souls spending an extra two and a half hours slowly getting hotter. What I remember most is how stressed I was that my daughter was so upset, how embarrassed I was to be “that family” whose child couldn’t be consoled. I wanted so desperately to soothe her but wasn’t able to because I was too stressed myself. A nonanxious presence I was not. On airplanes, they tell you, “in the event of a loss of cabin pressure, put on your own oxygen first before assisting children.” It’s the same with stress: in the event of an increase of cabin (or school, or life) pressure, tackle your own stress first before attempting to help others.
—Ned
2. Behavior
The second way you can inadvertently turn your child’s anxiety genes “on” is through your behavior. Let’s suppose your anxiety is more of the social variety (the most common form of anxiety, by the way), which means you experience intense fear of being scrutinized and negatively evaluated by others in social situations. A study out of Johns Hopkins University found that parents who suffer from this form of anxiety tend to have difficulty communicating warmth and affection, are more critical, and generally express more doubt about their children’s abilities than less anxious parents do. They are more apt to be overcontrolling and less likely to grant autonomy—behaviors known to increase anxiety in children.10
If this all sounds familiar, it’s not insurmountable. Since behaviors can fire up unwanted genes, it stands to reason that we can prevent the ignition of those genes by avoiding certain behaviors. Johns Hopkins researchers conducted a study where they identified children who were at a high risk for developing anxiety. One group received a family-oriented therapy intervention program that focused on reducing factors that contributed to anxiety in kids and parents, such as parental modeling of anxiety. Only 9 percent of the kids in the intervention group developed an anxiety disorder in the next year, compared to 21 percent of the kids in families that were provided only with written instructions about managing anxiety, and 30 percent in families that got no therapy or written instructions. A study in 2016 replicated this finding, except that this time 5 percent of kids in the intervention group developed an anxiety disorder, compared to 31 percent of the control group.11
If you have unmanaged anxiety, tread carefully. Because of your anxiety, it will be harder for you to give up control when it comes to your kids, which may very well result in their rebelling, which will make your anxiety spike and your need for control even greater . . . which will make them further rebel. You see the negative feedback loop here? Though we offer some tools in this book, we also encourage parents suffering from anxiety to consult with a therapist. There are ways of retraining our minds to avoid negative feedback loops and to deflect potential sources of anxiety.
That ends the science portion of our program. There’s also a common sense portion. When parents worry about their kids, it undermines the kids’ confidence. Bill recently evaluated Robert, a sixteen-year-old with a social anxiety disorder. Bill asked Robert about his social life, in response to which he told Bill about things he likes to do with his friends. He also said that he often enjoys being with his family, but he quickly added that he sometimes wants to “get away” from them:
ROBERT: Mom’s always worried about me. She’s always worried that I’ll do something bad. One night I didn’t tell her where I was and she was really worried. My dad just said, “Have fun and don’t get arrested.”
BILL: How long has she worried about you like this?
ROBERT: She’s done it for a while. I didn’t notice it until last year when I tried to push her away a bit. She told me that when I was younger she would walk by my class to make sure I was getting along with the other kids.
BILL: When was that?
ROBERT: Fourth grade through sixth grade.
BILL: How did you react when she said that?
ROBERT: [Shrugs] Even if I’m shy and might not always get along with kids, she doesn’t have to be worried about me all the time.
BILL: Do you feel like you have a good relationship with your mom?
ROBERT: I do when she’s not on me all the time.
Bill hears the parents’ end of this discussion, too. It’s common for a mom or dad to weep quietly when discussing their child’s difficulties and then say, “I just want him to feel good about himself.” After passing the tissues and waiting for the feelings to settle down, Bill says, “It’s hard to help Robert (or Tim, or Edward) feel good about himself if we’re worried sick about him.” It’s common sense. If we’re unable to accept our kids as they are, how can we expect them to accept themselves?
Calm Is Contagious
Just as our kids mirror our stress, they can also mirror our calm. You probably know calm people, those who always project an aura of well-being and are able to maintain a sense of control while accepting the messiness in the world around them. They are the ones you want to call in a crisis, or whose presence you crave when you’re feeling edgy, because they somehow help level you out. Without preaching, without even doing much of anything, these peop
le communicate calm and confidence to those around them, and help others develop a similar sense of balance in their own lives.
One of the reasons we know this is because we are this nonanxious presence to many of our clients. We think of ourselves as being a bit like Michael Clarke Duncan’s character in The Green Mile, only instead of sucking up other peoples’ cancer, our role is to remove their stress. It’s as if we’re saying, “Let me take that. I can handle it. You don’t need that anymore.” A mother recently told us that she comes to all our lectures because every time she hears the message that it’s right (and safe) for her not to continually worry about her children or be on their case, she is able to “hold” the calmness and confidence, at least for some time. Another parent told Bill, “When I left your office the last time we talked, I felt so calm. I had Jill’s life in such a positive perspective. The problem is that within an hour of leaving here, I talked to another parent from Jill’s school and my anxiety level shot up again.”
Ned’s calming effect on his students and their parents is perhaps even more measurable. While he deliberately doesn’t maintain statistics on score improvement for the kids he tutors, a rise of hundreds of points on a standardized test is not uncommon. The kids he tutors learn math and vocabulary, of course, but not one of them believes that a few math tricks or a new word list made all the difference between one testing and the next. Why, when kids have already tried classes and books and strategies, can a few sessions with Ned cause such a spike in scores?
The Self-Driven Child Page 9