Letting Our Children Fail : Will This Cure Our Anxious Kids?

Letting Our Children Fail : Will This Cure Our Anxious Kids?
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I work in a clinic for children and teens with anxiety and depression. I see young people struggle with paralyzing fears every day.

So it came as no surprise when I saw last week’s New York Times article Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety? I then found more on anxiety and depression in children on yourmodernfamily.com, CNN and The Atlantic.

This topic is everywhere, and for good reason; our children are in crisis.

According to one study, the feeling of being overwhelmed has surged among teenagers from 18% in 1985 to 41% in 2016. Rates of anxiety, depression and suicide among children and teens are soaring.

Are phones to blame? Our hyper-connected world? Video games? Ineffective parenting? Our achievement-oriented culture?

It’s hard to say, and there are probably many factors at play here. But what I do know, we need to make adjustments to raise healthier children.

Two days after the Times article came out, I noticed a social media post about the popularity of Jessica Lahey’s book The Gift Of Failure; How The Best Parents Learn To Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. This is a fantastic book with a great message - that our children need to learn the natural consequences of their actions without being over-protected by us parents. But with so many severely anxious young people being driven toward mental illness over the very possibility of failing, how do we change our parenting - to let them fail - without them collapsing under their weight of their worst fear? Is the solution to cast them out into the world to flounder and hope for the best?

In the book The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, Dr. Madeline Levine stresses the fact that children and teens make poor choices. Their level of maturity, cognitive development and lack of life experience lead them to make mistakes.

It’s not a criticism. It just is.

And it means that we parents need to help, to monitor, to coach, to parent.

Dr. Levine describes a former patient whose parents, in an effort to encourage independence and autonomy in their twin 14-year-old daughters, booked hotel rooms at opposite ends of a resort while on vacation, having the children staying some distance away from their parents. During the vacation, the daughters experimented with alcohol and sex for the first time, to their profound regret. The aftermath of the girls’ poor – but typical - decisions caused the whole family emotional pain for years.

These children were allowed to fail, and this failure was tremendously damaging. The children were simply not mature enough to make responsible decisions on their own.

So how do we find the balance of protecting without helicoptering?

· Maintain the watchtower

When it comes to their physical and emotional well-being, our children need us to stay vigilant and monitor their well-being. We do not always need to intervene or change their circumstances, but we do need to coach them through making sound choices. For example, if someone says something unkind to one of my sons, we talk about what actions he can take in response. I guide him in to stand up for himself, while maintaining a high standard of kindness himself. As much as I’d like to march onto the playground to yell at the offender, I don’t. My son receives coaching on how to deal with life’s struggles without taking action to remove the struggle myself.

· Keep tasks age-appropriate task

Expecting my 6-year-old to pack his lunch everyday is not going to work out well. Failure in this department will not teach him autonomy or resilience. It will leave him hungry, grumpy and neglected. It my also create an anxious child because too much is being expected of him at too young of an age. When it comes to self-care and remembering materials, elementary-age children are forgetful. As parents, we can set up routines to help them remember their things, like using checklists or strategically placed post-its. Over time, we can shift the responsibility of using these tools onto our children. Many children are capable of self-care and remembering their things toward fourth or fifth grade.

· Encourage exploration with self-control

Whether we are emboldening a child to try a new sport, musical instrument or summer camp, we can stress the importance of controlling impulses in a new environment. Our kids often get nervous when trying something new, and this nervousness can lead them to acting too silly, too rough or inappropriate in general. We can talk to our children about ways to handle any nervous feeling about a new endeavor while keeping their body under control. This same idea can be used when our children go off to college; have fun without loosing your mind.

· Limit competition

Competition can bring about over-parenting and tension because it involves performance and comparisons. While there is a lot to be said for continuous improvement, learning and teamwork, these aspects are often drown-out in the face of soccer tournaments and piano competitions, which emphasize scores and rankings. While some children enjoy competition, others experience anxiety around performing. There are many activities that a child can enjoy that do not involve competition. If and when a child grows more confident in his/her abilities, they may choose to compete. In the meantime, participating in a hobby for sheer enjoyment is enough.

There is no doubt we parents often rescue our children from peril, preventing them from learning valuable life lessons about failure, frustration and disappointment. Over-protective parenting seems to act as Miracle Grow for anxiety. When it comes to finding the balance between letting a child experience failure but also coaching, protecting and parenting them, perhaps the answer lies in the saying “Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.”

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