when Anxiety Takes Over Parenting - It's not just helicopter parenting you need to look out for
Parenting teenagers today is anxiety provoking.
There are more challenges than ever when it comes to parenting teens. More pressure, more uncertainty, and more things to worry about: vaping, online gaming, social media. It’s hard not to feel anxious when they’re behind their closed doors.
But when anxiety is in charge, it reduces our options for behaviour and impacts the effectiveness of our parenting.
Anxiety’s role is to protect us from danger. It has a very limited repertoire of behaviours associated with it: fight, flight, and freeze.
When we are anxious or stressed out by our kids or work, our urge to fix, snap at the family, fight them to get them to do what we want, or equally retreat into our room on our device, numbing our feelings of stress, is strong.
This is not how you ever planned to be as a parent.
You're not broken, just human….with human emotions and action urges.
But these stresses and reactions, left unchecked, will impact your relationship with your teen. They're learning about how to manage their own stress or anxiety from you.
This is why I focus on providing support to parents to manage their stress and anxiety in better ways—so as to improve their behavioural choice, and in turn, their parenting, their relationship with their teen, and their teen’s emotion regulation.
The change you want starts with truly nurturing you.
All the strategies that you really wish your teen would use—the mindfulness, the breathing, the relaxation, and the exercise—are all things that every parent, particularly parents of teenagers, really need to double down on.
The most important action to take is to pause.
Pause between what you feel like you impulsively want to do and the action you take. It’s in that moment you gain insight and control—to choose the action you want to take and parent on purpose again.
Want some help to learn to do this? I provide parent coaching inside my Calm Connection Program. Info is here.
