Parenting Through Your Own Anxiety: How to Stay Present When You Are Struggling Too
Anxious parents often produce anxious children, not out of negligence or bad intent, but because children are exquisitely sensitive to the emotional climate of the adults they depend on. If you are managing your own anxiety while trying to parent well, you are likely already aware of this dynamic and already feeling the added weight of it: the fear that your struggles are affecting your children, that you are somehow transmitting your worry rather than protecting your family from it. I want to offer something different from that self-critical framing. Parenting with anxiety is genuinely hard, and the willingness to address it, which you are demonstrating by reading this, is itself an act of care for your children. As a therapist serving families in Hidden Hills and Calabasas for over forty years, some of the most meaningful work I do is with parents who are trying to interrupt a cycle they did not choose to inherit.
How Parental Anxiety Shows Up
Anxious parenting does not always look like helicopter parenting, though it can. It also shows up as:
- Difficulty tolerating your child’s distress, leading to over-reassurance that does not actually help them develop their own capacity to cope
- Catastrophizing about your child’s problems in ways that amplify rather than contain their anxiety
- Rigidity around routines or safety, communicating to the child that the world is more dangerous than it needs to be experienced
- Emotional unavailability during your own high-anxiety periods, leaving children to manage themselves without the co-regulation that helps develop emotional capacity
- Modeling anxious self-talk or worry behavior that children absorb and replicate
None of this makes you a bad parent. It makes you a human being with your own history, doing your best. But understanding how your anxiety is showing up in your parenting is the first step toward changing it.
The Concept of Good Enough Parenting
Child development research has been consistent on a point that is enormously liberating when parents truly take it in: children do not need perfect parents. They need good enough parents. Parents who are present and responsive most of the time, who repair when they have failed, who demonstrate that mistakes can be acknowledged and relationships can be restored. Perfection in parenting is not only impossible. It is not actually what children need in order to develop well.
What this means in practice is that the goal is not to eliminate your anxiety before you can parent well. It is to develop enough awareness of your anxiety that you can notice when it is driving your responses, and to build enough capacity to regulate yourself that you can be present with your child even when you are not feeling your best.
Addressing Your Own Anxiety Is Parenting
I often tell parents who come to work with me on their own mental health: this is parenting. Coming to therapy, learning to recognize and regulate your own anxiety, building your emotional capacity, is not taking time away from your children. It is investing in the quality of the presence you are able to bring to them.
Children develop their emotional regulation in relationship with adults who are able to regulate themselves. When you calm your own nervous system in a difficult moment, you are literally teaching your child how to do the same. When you model honest acknowledgment of difficulty and repair after a mistake, you are teaching resilience. When you take your own wellbeing seriously, you are demonstrating to your children that their wellbeing matters too. The two are not in competition. They are the same project.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
Ready to Begin?
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
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