Last week, I wrote about Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation. This week, Dr. Mathilde Ross, a senior staff psychiatrist at Boston University, wrote an Op-ed in the New York Times about the anxious parents she deals with. Clearly, many young people attending college are anxious, she writes. But her concern is that “parents are allowing their anxiety to take over, and it’s not helping anyone, least of all their children.”
To the parents who call her complaining that their children are anxious, Dr. Ross attempts to soothe them with words like, “Anxiety in this setting is usually normal because major life transitions like living away from home for the first time are commonly associated with elevated anxiety.” Back in the day, that kind of reassurance worked. Not anymore. Now, the parents question Ross’s ability and credentials, convinced she is ignoring clear mental health warning signals. But as the good doctor assesses, “Today’s parents are suffering from anxiety about anxiety, which is actually much more serious than anxiety. It’s self-fulfilling and not easily soothed by logic or evidence, such as the knowledge that most everyone adjusts to college just fine.”
Here is another problem: parents who worry if their college student children do not show signs of anxiety. This is demonstrated in the parental interpretation of a child encouraged to make an appointment with a school counselor to confirm that everything is going well in the semester. If the child feels fine and declines, the parents worry that the student is hiding a mental health crisis.
Here is her advice to combat parental anxiety.
- “Get a grip.”
One of my favorite family therapists, Edwin Friedman, put it this way: practice a non-anxious presence. Sometimes, children behave in unhealthy ways because a parent is very anxious. The child acts out to cope. Friedman wrote that the child was the “identified patient,” revealing that the family system had issues that needed to be addressed. See the connection with Dr. Ross’s recommendation?
- Secondly, if the student calls at the beginning of the semester expressing anxiety, the parent or parents can encourage with these words, “You’ll get through this; this is normal; we’ll laugh about this phone call at Thanksgiving.”
- Listen without offering a solution.
Just listen.
- If there is anxiety over a challenging class and the child expresses the fear of lacking intelligence, reply with this admonition: Do your work. Read your material, write your papers, and study for tests. Make these actions the priority for the semester over romance, fun, and the college experience.
Sometimes, first-semester students feel overwhelmed and worry about flunking out. “[F]ailing all of one’s classes and being expelled as a result, all within the first semester, is essentially impossible and is particularly rare among those students who are worrying about it,” Ross states. “The administrative process simply doesn’t happen that fast. Besides, you haven’t paid enough tuition yet.”
Ross’s concern is that the heightened attention to mental health crises is actually “disempowering parents from helping their adult children handle ordinary things. People are increasingly fearful that any normal emotion is a sign of something serious. But if you send your adult children to a mental health professional at the first sign of distress, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to strengthen your relationship with them. This is the beginning of their adult relationship with you. Show them the way.”
I truly appreciate this balanced assessment of a very real problem—anxiety in America. We need more voices in this conversation, and I enjoyed sharing two of them with you this past week.
I will end by reminding all of us that anguish and concern are a price we pay for living in a fallen world. The Son of God demonstrated this when he sweated so profusely it was as if he was shedding drops of blood in the Garden. Yet I take it by faith that the one who instructed us not to be anxious did not violate this command himself.
If you must be concerned, be concerned. But don’t practice anxiety.
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