Despite the potential for love and understanding, the dynamic between children and parents is extremely complex, fraught with the risk of hurt and pain on both sides. It is also — unsurprisingly — the source of many emotional difficulties we face in life.
In this essay, we offer a counterintuitive hypothesis about raising healthy children. Our observation is not based on scientific research, but rather on our experience, coupled with anecdotal evidence from parents and participants who have attended our seminar, “The Art of Compassionate Parenting,” along with the “Why Life Sucks” seminar.
Use it only as an invitation to further inquiry.
Most parents clearly care deeply about their children’s wellbeing, and often that concern is expressed in the form of worrying about their children. Examples of major sources of worry include their children’s academic habits and performance, health, social skills and technology and social media influences.
We propose that anything parents constantly worry about in regard to their children’s lives can become entrenched as a lifelong struggle for the child.
On the other hand, if parents are relaxed and communicate their confidence in the child’s ability to overcome the challenge, it is far more likely that the problem will gradually evaporate.
We know students who never did their homework or attended school regularly, or had poor social skills, or were overweight as children. But when their parents did not worry and instead communicated optimism to the children that they would be able to overcome their challenges while providing unconditional support, the children no longer struggled with those issues later in life.
On the other hand, we have recurringly found that in families where such issues were the focus of parental anxiety, the children have internalized this and struggled with these problems for much of their lives.
Our hypothesis is not intended as a catchall remedy and a panacea for every instance. Rather, we are only saying that families that obsess about their children’s problems may be unwittingly making it harder for their children to be resilient in those areas of concern.
Parental anxiety about a facet of a child’s life convinces the child that they indeed have a “serious” issue and, moreover, that they cannot be counted upon to handle it themselves. It becomes unconsciously a major source of attention for the child.
The trifecta structure of parental anxiety, reinforcement through excessive attention and the lack of confidence in the child’s ability to resolve the problem on their own often converges to give the issue more staying power. This is the classic self-fulfilling prophecy that psychologists have talked about.
We communicate our fears and anxieties to our children in a thousand ways, and the child’s self-image is forever shaped by the disempowering beliefs that well-intentioned and loving parents may have communicated.
It is important to understand that children are incredibly resilient, creative and capable of surmounting obstacles under the right conditions.
The “right” conditions would be for us, as parents, to communicate confidence in our children’s ability to overcome their challenges and provide them unconditional love and support. This will go a long way in parents being a healing presence for their children and instilling confidence in them, rather than creating an antagonistic dynamic with lifelong effects.