How to help kids who struggle with anxiety they inherited from you
by Tara Shafer posted in Parenting
My people are anxious people. I come from them. I produce them.
I'm interested in the genetics of anxiety. I have strong memories of the formation of my childhood temperament. I never took things lightly and the things that made me anxious were things that were insubstantial in the grand scheme of things. But of course, children have no concept of the grand scheme of things.
As a mother, I see the seeds of these often inherited tendencies in my children from time to time. When I see it ? rightly or wrongly ? I do the best I can to resist making this temperament into a pathology. I watch anxiety emerge from time to time in the children I love. It starts early. I observed children as young as two or three worried about things ? school pick ups and other things. I don?t want them to be scared. I see them on a distant shore and I can?t always reach them. I have observed a certain fear in their eyes and I can?t say a great deal because their process is theirs - and it is not my story to tell.
So I confide and I try not to overshare.
One early memory of my own anxiety took place when I was tasked with selling holiday cards to apartment building neighbors. I went to each door and took orders, noting them on a school-issued order form which I then promptly lost. I remember searching everywhere ? and growing more and more stressed that I would not be able to deliver these cards. I lay in bed at night afraid. I believed that my neighbors would be ...
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