They say you are only as happy as your least happy child, to which a very wise psychotherapist friend of mine often replies: your children do not exist to make you happy, you exist to do that, so get on with it. It’s a rather harsh parenting pill that I have had to swallow: in our house, as in so many others, childhood anxiety reared its ugly head during the pandemic, and I felt miserable about it because I just want my child to feel good. But I also have a tendency to err into a place of guilt and blame myself for my child’s anxiety. Maybe if I wasn’t such a gigantic screw-up, she’d be happy all the time? Is this anxiety a sign that I am a terrible parent?
That’s my own anxiety talking there, just in case you were wondering.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about childhood anxiety, in part because of personal experience, but also because earlier this month, research by the Oxford University Press found that ‘anxiety’ was children’s word of the year for 2021. This made for grim headlines and lots of commentary about how Covid has ruined the lives of an entire…
