Читать книгу Anxiety For Dummies - W. Doyle Gentry, Laura L. Smith - Страница 60

Blaming parents for almost anything that ails you is easy. Parents usually do the best they can. Raising children poses a formidable task. So in most cases, parents don’t deserve as much blame as they receive. However, they do hold responsibility for the way that you were brought up to the extent that it may have contributed to your woes.

Three parenting styles appear to foster anxiety in children:

 Over-protectors: These parents shield their kids from every imaginable stress or harm. If their kids stumble, they swoop them up before they even hit the ground. When their kids get upset, they fix the problem. Not surprisingly, their kids fail to find out how to tolerate fear, anxiety, or frustration.

 Over-controllers: These parents micro-manage all their children’s activities. They direct every detail from how they should play to what they should wear to how they solve arithmetic problems. They discourage independence and fertilize dependency and anxiety.

 Inconsistent responders: The parents in this group provide their kids with erratic rules and limits. One day, they respond with understanding when their kids have trouble with their homework; the next day, they explode when their kids ask for help. These kids fail to discover the connection between their own efforts and a predictable outcome. Therefore, they feel that they have little control over what happens in life. It’s no wonder that they feel anxious.

If you recognize your own parenting style in any of these descriptions and worry that your behavior may be affecting your child, flip to Chapter 20 to see how you can help your child overcome her anxiety.

During unpredictably tough times like a pandemic, parents may find themselves becoming overly controlling and/or overly protective. Parents also may seem inconsistent during a pandemic when the rules change because of changing health information. Those reactions are perfectly understandable. When life and death decisions are in play, an extra dose of caution is warranted. So, control and protect when it comes to critical threats to health. At the same time, try to find some decisions that your children can safely make on their own. It’s important to give them a sense of independence and autonomy during such stressful times. You can do so by giving choices over clothing, types of masks, movies to watch, or family games to play.