6 Ways Your Anxiety is Undermining Your Positive Parenting
Positive parenting has become increasingly popular in recent years. It’s a wonderful way to approach and address your child’s individual needs. In doing so, you can learn what works best for them to overcome some of the common challenges they might face in childhood.
While positive parenting can help your child with anxiety, there isn’t always a lot of focus on how your own anxiety might negatively impact it.
If you’re one of the millions of people struggling with anxiety and worry, it could be undermining your positive parenting and affecting the way you interact with your child.
Not sure if that’s what’s happening in your parent-child relationship? Let’s look at a few ways your anxiety could be getting in the way of your positive parenting.
1. You Do It All
Parents are known for taking care of everything, but there are parts of that stereotype that aren’t beneficial to you or your child.
When you have anxiety, you might worry that giving your child any sort of responsibility or freedom might not meet your expectations. For example, asking them to wash the dishes might trigger your anxiety. What if they don’t do it “right”? What if they break a dish? Instead, you just end up doing them, yourself.
That robs your child of a positive experience and takes away an opportunity for you to offer them responsibility and praise, or to help them develop a strength.
2. You Don’t Help Them With Emotions
Positive parenting is about helping your child work through their emotions in a positive way. That’s how they learn to overcome challenges. When you struggle with anxiety, though, you might step in immediately when they’re struggling and “fix” the problem for them.
While that can help in the moment, it isn’t teaching your child anything. It isn’t giving them the opportunity to learn and grow for future challenges.
3. You Take Control of Their Activities
One of the biggest aspects of positive parenting is catering to your child’s strengths and skills. However, that can be difficult when you have anxiety. You might constantly feel the need to be in control just to feel calm. So, you decide on their activities for them, and only let them get involved in things you know you can do well.
Doing so limits your child and might never allow them to grow and excel in areas they really enjoy.
4. You Increase Their Dependence
Positively parenting your child is a great way to teach them independence. When they feel more confident in their ability to do things, they’re more likely to branch out and find other things they enjoy. They’ll also be more comfortable trying things on their own without constant guidance or “hand-holding”.
Unfortunately, your anxiety can undermine that. If you’re trying to do everything for them to ease your own worries, you’ll quickly cause them to be dependent on your help, rather than fostering a sense of positive self-esteem.
5. You Can Hold Them Back
One of the goals of positive parenting is fostering your child’s strengths so they continuously grow. When you have anxiety, you could actually end up holding your child back from age-appropriate activities.
You might be so worried about them hurting themselves or having a bad experience that you say “no” to things that might be beneficial or a positive learning opportunity. As a result, your child might struggle to keep up with their peers.
6. You Might Be Too Strict
If you’re struggling with anxiety, you might have rules in place that are too strict. Your mind can tell you those rules are to keep your child safe. But, they could be so restricting that they keep your child from experiencing things.
Positive parenting should be encouraging and beneficial for both you and your child. Anxiety can hinder any efforts you might make to foster growth and self-esteem. But, it doesn’t have to.
If you’re dealing with anxiety and you know it’s taking over your parenting style, contact me to set up an appointment. Together, we’ll work on getting to the root cause of your anxiety. From there, you can learn techniques to manage your symptoms, and be the positive parent you want to be.