September Anxiety Roundup

chickens coming home to roost

Before reproducing, Joe and I used to do a bit about having an anxious child. “Mummy, Daddy, I’m nuhvous,” the hypothetical child would say, in a British accent, about everything all the time, having inherited all our anxious genes. I wasn’t sure why I started this or kept it going, but now I see that it was practice. I was steeling myself in advance.

Play and connection are the best antidotes for anxiety, according to The Opposite of Worry: The Playful Parenting Approach to Childhood Anxieties and Fears. This is the first book I read specifically about childhood anxiety, and it’s a good one, full of suggestions for modeling “lighthearted contradictions to anxiety”¹ so you can be the “calm second chicken” for your child. If a scared chicken observes another brood member calmly pecking about the barnyard, the scared chicken will be reassured. This is also the idea behind “dither fish,” which I learned about while keeping aquariums. It can work well in families where one child tends to be less anxious than the other, except when it backfires and the scared chicken transfers their fears to the second chicken. In our experience, this transfer often seems to render the first chicken less scared. E.g. the first chicken is now less afraid of public restrooms and able to reassure the second chicken about them, although the second chicken would likely not be afraid if not for the first, etc.

The concept takes on a fun meta quality if your child is afraid of actual chickens, which graze freely outside her school. A classmate told her they peck people, which is false, but I guess anxious chickens flock together. Last year, I didn’t know what to do about the chickens, but now I’m reading Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD², which advises: “If your child is able to make herself feel a powerful feeling that is not fear, then she will probably feel less scared.” Humor or anger/ playful aggression seem to work best for this. Don’t overthink it. “Less talk, more play.”

At the beach (another source of anxiety for my kid) this summer, I helped her chase encroaching seagulls while she yelled like a gladiator. A lot of kids do stuff like this naturally, which while annoying, makes psychological sense. My second chicken, for example, enjoys chasing the school chickens. For a while, this worried my first chicken, who was worried her sister was going to “give the chickens a stomachache” or “get pecked,” but now when a chicken gets too close for comfort, we lunge at them, and they always bolt. (The idea of chickens standing their ground is a little terrifying, as anyone who’s seen The Birds can attest.)

Having an anxious child has made me realize how disassociated I’ve become from my own anxiety. I’m aware that I have anxiety; I take medication for it. And yet I’ve intentionally built a life and persona designed to spare myself and others its discomforts (except for the reproducing part). “We may believe that anxiety and fear don’t concern us because we avoid experiencing them,” Harriet Lerner is quoted as saying in The Opposite of Worry. “We may keep the scope of our lives narrow and familiar, opting for sameness and safety.” Touché, Harriet Lerner³. “Our challenge: to be willing to become MORE anxious, via embracing new situations and stepping more fully into our lives.”

The book goes on to suggest doing something “fun, safe, and scary” every day. Adults, too. This is easy to remember, and I’m trying, even if it’s often something very basic like sending a text message. It reminds me that even the most basic stuff isn’t basic for a kid. They don’t have the same luxury of keeping things familiar because everything is new.

Another sign of how disassociated I’ve become from my anxiety: when I heard that Anxiety was a character in Inside Out 2, I thought that seemed gimmicky since they already have Fear. They’re not the same, as the movie explains then shows: Fear protects us from stuff we can see, while Anxiety protects us from stuff we can’t see. (This is an oversimplification, but the movie adds nuance.)

Why am I so dense about an emotion that has in many ways defined my life? Maybe because they didn’t make movies like this when I was 5. I don’t even think I knew the word “anxiety” when I was 5. Yet after seeing this movie in the theater (twice), my kid has a visual vocabulary to talk about anxiety. She can talk about it (or even to it) as something separate from herself. Sometimes she even says, “I’m nervous” (although not in a British accent) instead of melting down. This is the kind of movie that makes me think screen-free parents (of whom we know more than the average amount because of the chicken school) are missing out.

That brings me to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which I’d be remiss to neglect in a 2024 anxiety roundup. I read it and am lukewarm. I was anxious enough pre-social media to be skeptical about Haidt’s causative claims, yet I don’t think it’s news to anyone that social media and other digital substitutes for embodied connection make anxiety worse. Naturally, since “real” connections, with other people and the physical world, are what make anxiety better. I’m not sure anyone needs a whole book to be convinced of this, but I think Haidt’s core suggestions (no smartphones before high school or social media before 16; phone-free schools; more free play and responsibility in the real world) are good ones, although will probably be harder to enforce outside the chicken school.

Some of the best writing about anxiety (and in general) I’ve read lately has been in other newsletters. My friend Helen wrote an incredibly wise and empathetic newsletter about coaching her young daughter through a nighttime bout of anxiety. My friend Claire sent me this gorgeous piece by

Edan Lepucki

, whose newsletter I now pay for so I can read more. There’s also this post about anxiety and moral direction, which got a lot of attention and I think is on the right track, except preoccupied with “sexual morality” in a way that feels less relevant to me.

I do believe our collective anxiety has a moral component, though. Carl Jung said that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. If anxiety concerns “things we can’t see,” it seems like we ignore those things at our peril. If our comfort comes at the expense and exploitation of others, if our tax dollars are used to blow up children, if we’re forced to live in ways that violate our core values, it’s unsurprising that the suppression of these realities might spur an anxiety epidemic. For me, this anxiety crops up in my dreams, many of which involve losing my children in an unfamiliar country. They’re anxiety dreams, but the primary emotion is pain, and they remind me of this poem by Wendell Berry, which I’ll end on, since it sums things up better than I can:

The Way of Pain 

1.
For parents, the only way
is hard. We who give life
give pain. There is no help.
Yet we who give pain
give love; by pain we learn
the extremity of love.

2.
I read of Abraham’s sacrifice
the Voice required of him,
so that he led to the altar
and the knife his only son.
The beloved life was spared
that time, but not the pain.
It was the pain that was required.

3.
I read of Christ crucified,
the only begotten Son
sacrificed to flesh and time
and all our woe. He died
and rose, but who does not tremble
for his pain, his loneliness,
and the darkness of the sixth hour?
Unless we grieve like Mary
at His grave, giving Him up
as lost, no Easter morning comes.

4.
And then I slept, and dreamed
the life of my only son
was required of me, and I
must bring him to the edge
of pain, not knowing why.
I woke, and yet that pain
was true. It brought his life
to the full in me. I bore him
suffering, with love like the sun,
too bright, unsparing, whole.

(Wendell Berry)

1. Note that contradicting is not the same as dismissing. Everything I’ve read says validation (e.g. “I know it feels scary”) needs to precede reassurance. I think adults forget this, especially ones who haven’t truly learned to sit with their own anxiety like me. From Breaking Free of Child Anxiety & OCD: “Think of tolerating your child’s distress as a lesson you’re teaching your child. It’s as though you’re saying, ‘This makes me very uncomfortable, but I am going to cope with it because I know I have to’—which is precisely what you want your child to be able to say about her own anxiety.”

2. This book is also helpful but worksheet based, which must explain the “scientifically proven” claim (got to be able to show that work!). Some of the worksheets seem unnecessary/redundant, while others I began with enthusiasm before being interrupted and am no longer sure I’ll ever actually “finish” the book. The general principle is to identify then gradually reduce the “accommodations” you make for your child’s anxiety, so I’m trying to keep this in mind even if I don’t do all the homework.

3. Harriet Lerner is probably best known for her first book, The Dance of Anger, which provoked a misogynistic backlash that her son, Ben Lerner, explores in his recent novel, The Topeka School. I’m fascinated by this book and the Lerner mother/son dyad, so hit me up if you have thoughts on either Lerner!