Where is all of the anxiety coming from?

[Anonymous]

I teach in a Title 1 school. Over the years, I might have one student every 2-3 years with anxiety. This summer I worked as a camp counselor at a camp at a private school. Fully 1/3 of the parents told me their kids have anxiety. What’s going on? Is it being over diagnosed? 1-2 of them seem like they do have anxiety but the rest are like normal kids. There’s nothing about them that says they have anxiety.

[Anonymous]

Disregulated adults at home.
Screen time
Parents hunting until they find a diagnosis they like
Social media
Societal instability
Loss of the “village”

(Not in a particular order)

[Anonymous]

Ha good question. There was a long thread recently on the Private Schools forum about how half of private school kids have diagnoses now. Parents are much more likely to get kids diagnosed and it’s easier to get diagnoses. The anxiety one is a head-scratcher since generally anxiety is not diagnosed until older teens/young adulthood. My guess is that parents can’t tolerate normal childhood worries, or that other behaviors are interpreted as anxiety.

[Anonymous]

I agree that there are a lot of disregulated parents out there. Recently attended a middle school meeting and the questions being asked by people in their 40s and 50s was astounding. ‘How will my child know which classroom to go to on their own?’ ‘How will they know how to open a locker combination?’ No idea how they have made it this far in the world on their own, let alone parenting. No wonder their kids are anxious.

[Anonymous]

I do think a major part of the problem here is more parents with anxiety and they are either modeling anxious behavior for kids or projecting anxious feelings onto kids -- probably both. And also I think in some families it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle -- anxious kids make adults anxious and and anxious adults make kids anxious.

But stopping the inquiry there doesn't make sense. What is making parents anxious? Here are my theories:

- Cultural intolerance for failure of any kind. A kid has a tantrum in the grocery store and their parent is a "bad parent." A kid has a rough year in elementary and they are a "bad kid." These are normal things but a lot of people (not just parents) view them as evidence of unacceptable failure by families. This makes the stakes incredibly high for everything.

- Economic pressure. Inflation and rising housing and college costs hit families hard. Even with inflation in check I know I rarely have a day where I don't think about the cost of *something* -- whether it's rising college costs and wondering if we need to be saving more or rising healthcare costs and wondering if we need to save more for retirement or even something small like discovering an activity my family did last summer now costs twice as much. Throw in some job instability with layoffs and stealth layoffs and this is stress and anxiety inducing for families at every economic level. This trickles down to kids.

- Ambient stress over political issues and the environment which are amped up from the Covid hangover.

[Anonymous]

Anxiety-ridden parents with too much disposable income and no real concrete connection between the work they do and the amount of money they have. They create issues where none need be so that they have something to throw money at and try to produce results.

Read the post in Tween and Teen forum about the shy kid. (Or most posts in that forum, really.) So many immediately jump to therapy and meds for shyness. We are a sick society.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree that there are a lot of disregulated parents out there. Recently attended a middle school meeting and the questions being asked by people in their 40s and 50s was astounding. ‘How will my child know which classroom to go to on their own?’ ‘How will they know how to open a locker combination?’ No idea how they have made it this far in the world on their own, let alone parenting. No wonder their kids are anxious.

These are normal questions that parents of new middle school kids have been asking for decades. Yes it seems silly from the outside -- of course these kids will figure it out. But parents have always worried over transition years for their kids and the transition from elementary to middle is often one of the harder ones for parents because puberty is the hardest maturity shift for parents to accept in kids. It's generally not that hard to imagine your 4 year old being a 5 year old doing kindergarten things even though it can be bittersweet -- it's not that different. But the difference between a 5th grader and a 6th grader is jarring and parents often struggle with that shift -- a 10 year old seems like a little kid a lot of the time. A 12 yr old is practically a teen. A lot happens very fast.

Treating this kind of parental anxiety as problematic or out of the ordinary ignores the fact that parents have always worried over kids this age. Normal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree that there are a lot of disregulated parents out there. Recently attended a middle school meeting and the questions being asked by people in their 40s and 50s was astounding. ‘How will my child know which classroom to go to on their own?’ ‘How will they know how to open a locker combination?’ No idea how they have made it this far in the world on their own, let alone parenting. No wonder their kids are anxious.

These are normal questions that parents of new middle school kids have been asking for decades. Yes it seems silly from the outside -- of course these kids will figure it out. But parents have always worried over transition years for their kids and the transition from elementary to middle is often one of the harder ones for parents because puberty is the hardest maturity shift for parents to accept in kids. It's generally not that hard to imagine your 4 year old being a 5 year old doing kindergarten things even though it can be bittersweet -- it's not that different. But the difference between a 5th grader and a 6th grader is jarring and parents often struggle with that shift -- a 10 year old seems like a little kid a lot of the time. A 12 yr old is practically a teen. A lot happens very fast.

Treating this kind of parental anxiety as problematic or out of the ordinary ignores the fact that parents have always worried over kids this age. Normal.

Completely disagree. Sure, parents have always cared about middle school transition but previous generations of parents didn’t have two and three meetings at school ahead of the school year. There might have been a back to school night. That’s it. Obsessing over every single thing your child needs to do and learn as they grow is not healthy.

[Anonymous]

OP here. Interesting thoughts. You would think my students at school would experience anxiety since their families are much more unstable financially, socially, etc than these wealthy kids. There wealth is unbelievable. I had these kids for 8 weeks (most go to this private school) and the vacations they went on sounded super expensive. Fiji, private yachts in the Mediterranean, etc. You would think that level of wealth would cause kids to feel stable. They don’t need to worry if they will be evicted (like my students).

[Anonymous]

Parents who are disconnected from their kids. They don’t actually spend time talking to their kids and trying to understand their feelings. They are just on their phones scheduling activities for their kids, shuttling them to and fro, scrolling through social media, buying crap from Amazon.

And yes, I realize I am on my phone but right now my kids are playing outside with their cousins and I am taking a break after hosting brunch. I am rarely on my phone in their presence other than to respond to urgent texts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree that there are a lot of disregulated parents out there. Recently attended a middle school meeting and the questions being asked by people in their 40s and 50s was astounding. ‘How will my child know which classroom to go to on their own?’ ‘How will they know how to open a locker combination?’ No idea how they have made it this far in the world on their own, let alone parenting. No wonder their kids are anxious.

These are normal questions that parents of new middle school kids have been asking for decades. Yes it seems silly from the outside -- of course these kids will figure it out. But parents have always worried over transition years for their kids and the transition from elementary to middle is often one of the harder ones for parents because puberty is the hardest maturity shift for parents to accept in kids. It's generally not that hard to imagine your 4 year old being a 5 year old doing kindergarten things even though it can be bittersweet -- it's not that different. But the difference between a 5th grader and a 6th grader is jarring and parents often struggle with that shift -- a 10 year old seems like a little kid a lot of the time. A 12 yr old is practically a teen. A lot happens very fast.

Treating this kind of parental anxiety as problematic or out of the ordinary ignores the fact that parents have always worried over kids this age. Normal.

Completely disagree. Sure, parents have always cared about middle school transition but previous generations of parents didn’t have two and three meetings at school ahead of the school year. There might have been a back to school night. That’s it. Obsessing over every single thing your child needs to do and learn as they grow is not healthy.

Why is the school having three meetings then. How is that parents fault. Just have fewer meetings. Answer the questions and reassure parents. That's what schools did before -- why did it change.

Parents didn't magically become more anxious as a group on their own. They are responding to outside stimuli.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. Interesting thoughts. You would think my students at school would experience anxiety since their families are much more unstable financially, socially, etc than these wealthy kids. There wealth is unbelievable. I had these kids for 8 weeks (most go to this private school) and the vacations they went on sounded super expensive. Fiji, private yachts in the Mediterranean, etc. You would think that level of wealth would cause kids to feel stable. They don’t need to worry if they will be evicted (like my students).

Kids who are never given space or agency to figure things out on their own will catastrophic tiny inconveniences. Financial stability is not the same as grit and resolve. Far from it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents who are disconnected from their kids. They don’t actually spend time talking to their kids and trying to understand their feelings. They are just on their phones scheduling activities for their kids, shuttling them to and fro, scrolling through social media, buying crap from Amazon.

And yes, I realize I am on my phone but right now my kids are playing outside with their cousins and I am taking a break after hosting brunch. I am rarely on my phone in their presence other than to respond to urgent texts.

"I have a good reason to be on my phone posting on this website because I'm a good parent and if you look at my parenting in context that is obvious but all the other parents are terrible because I see them on their phones and there is no way that they have as good a reason as I do right now even though there is no way for me to know the context of their phone use."

Okay.

[Anonymous]

Just wait until adolescence. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

[Anonymous]

It’s coming from the parents. Yes, the low-income children have real hardships. But their parents aren’t out there expecting them to be class president, captain of a varsity team, get a 4.0 and get into Princeton. Upper income parents are a special kind of messed up lately.