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“My daughter is stressed out all the time.”
“My son is so anxious about everything.”
In our work—Bill is a clinical neuropsychologist, and Ned runs a test-prep tutoring company—we hear these worries from parents frequently. Some parents take their kids to therapy. Others look into medication or meditation programs. And still parents think they should do more to help. Many abandon their own activities, from exercise to date nights, because “I can’t leave—my child needs me too much!” Others have cried in Bill’s office, distraught because their kid doesn’t feel good about himself. It’s not intuitive to them that it’s hard for a kid to feel confident when his parents are worried sick about him. As it happens, the best thing to do to relieve anxiety in our children is to stop worrying about them, and to turn our focus toward lowering our own stress.
This feels counterintuitive to parents, who wonder what their state of mind has to do with their child’s. Yet when we are anxious about our kids, or anything else, that anxiety seeps into our kids—it’s called stress contagion. Stress is catching, like an emotional virus that spreads through a populated area. One stressed out colleague can raise the temperature in an office by five degrees. And when one person in a family is on edge, the others feel it, too. The brain is wired to sense threat, and picks up on anxiety, fear, anger, and frustration in others. It can even pick up fear in the smell of stressed people’s perspiration. The brain also has mirror neurons, with which we replicate what we see in others. This process starts in infancy, which is why babies will smile or stick out their tongues to mimic us. This is also why if a baby’s caregiver is stressed, the baby is likely to be fussier… leading to a caregiver who is more stressed, and downward the spiral goes.
Secondhand stress can linger even longer than the original source of the stress, which makes sense. If you experience a stressor in your own life like a looming deadline, there’s something you can do about it. But someone who is contaminated by all of your stress can’t. The worry just sits there, stewing around with no outlet. Add to this that kids are notoriously bad at correctly interpreting what they’re seeing. Whereas an adult might spend the evening around a grumpy spouse and think, “He’s in a bad mood, but it’s not about me,” kids are more apt to think that someone who is angry around them is angry with them. The amygdala—whose job it is to sense and respond to threat--takes over. When called on consistently, the amygdala begins to think its job is to be on all the time, that there is always threat. And an enlarged amygdala creates a reactive, anxious person.
Many parents feel that they keep their stress under wraps—that their kids have no idea. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to fake being calm. As psychologist Paul Ekman has shown, we have an involuntary expressive system that signals our feelings whether we want to share them or not. One family we know wanted to hide the fact that the mom had cancer from their temperamentally anxious daughter. This was a terrible idea. The girl had spent a lifetime studying her parents’ faces; she would see their stress, and its impact would be worsened by her sense they weren’t being honest with her. And their stress would be worsened by the fact that they were trying to hide the truth. Again, downward the spiral goes. When the parents shared the diagnosis with their daughter, she was naturally concerned, but at least the family was in sync and she was able to help her parents out, which mitigated her own stress.
The good news is that just as stress is catching, so is calm. Calm people are easy to identify, as they’re usually the person we want to be around if we’re feeling worried. Even just sitting with them makes us feel better. The trick, then, is to be that calm person for your kids, without faking it. Which is hard to do if you’re worried sick about them.
A parent’s first job is to show your child love and affection, but according to a recent study, managing your own stress is the next best thing you can do to be an effective parent. In fact, parental stress management ranked higher than maintaining a good relationship with a spouse, offering educational opportunities, and trying to ensure a child’s safety. Consider this permission to focus on you. Go to that exercise class. Go on that date night. Spend time with your friends. Meditate. Be in nature. Spend energy on a pastime that makes you happy and settles your emotions. It will not only make you a happier person, it will make you a better parent.
