How Does Your Parental Anxiety Manifest?

Introducing the "Parenting in Hard Mode" series for parents who come from a marginalized community and/or have mental health struggles.

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And now, onto the show…

Today is the start of our first-ever series: Parenting in Hard Mode. “Parenting in Hard Mode” is for parents who (like me) come from a marginalized community—such as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or neurodiverse—and/or parents who struggle with mental health issues—such as anxiety or depression. This series of essays published on Mondays is meant to create community with our fellow parents who feel like we’re doing all of this in “Hard Mode.” There are many ways that we’re all Parenting in Hard Mode—so please join us in the comments below with your own experiences.

Yesterday, after putting my son with an infected eye to sleep, I rushed off to Target to buy a large shelving unit for his monster truck and race car tracks. It was almost 9 pm at night.

Usually, like many tired parents, the thing I do after putting my kiddo to bed is clean/tidy the house as much as I can (which sometimes is no more than 10 minutes) and then try to take some time to self-care and rest. But all of a sudden, at the end of the day, I just had this uncontrollable urge to do something for my kid.

What I’ve come to realize is that this internal push to do something physical that benefits my child, anything at all, is triggered by my parental anxiety in situations where I feel out of control.

Case in point: Rushing off to the store after he goes to sleep (don’t worry, Dad was still home) because I was convinced at that moment that he needed me to organize his Hot Wheels track sets.

The chaotic corner of his playroom that I had to organize.

How common is parental anxiety?

I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) at age 29 on my first day of rehab for alcohol use disorder. This was long before I had my son at age 34 and almost a year before I met my husband. But I’m still unraveling and learning all of the ways that my GAD has impacted my past and continues to impact my present. Oh, and the future. So many future worries, y’all…

But parental anxieties don’t just strike those of us who have a diagnosed mental health illness.

For instance, I had a miscarriage with my first pregnancy and had the worst anxiety of my life when I was pregnant with Rio. Although I had a higher chance of suffering from perinatal anxiety due to already having GAD, anxiety during and after pregnancy can strike anyone. In fact, most studies show that 1 in 5 women experience anxiety during pregnancy and/or postpartum.

I haven’t seen any studies that have really looked into perinatal anxiety during the first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but certainly, parents identified female at birth experienced more postpartum depression during that time, so it’s a fairly reasonable (and obvious) assumption that postpartum anxiety numbers went up, too.

But pregnancy, childbirth, COVID-19, and pregnancy/childbirth during COVID-19 are not the only reasons for parental anxiety.

I don’t know who said it first but there’s something that many of us parents hear when we’re about to become parents: Having a child is like seeing your heart walk around outside of your body.

And while that phrase isn’t usually followed by anything, I think we can definitely add “… and this is why it’s so hard, stressful, heartbreaking, and anxiety-provoking to be a parent.”

Unsurprisingly, at least to myself and every other parent I know, 40% of us are extremely or very worried that our child will suffer from anxiety or depression, according to the Pew Research Center. And 75% of parents have observed symptoms of poor mental health (such as anxiety, depression, and stress) in their children, according to a 2023 survey by Rethink First.

As for parents ourselves, a 2022 survey by What to Expect found that 68% of mothers say they experience anxiety and 35% of those moms say their anxiety symptoms are “moderate” to “severe.”

There are many more studies and surveys that show similar numbers for parental anxiety, both before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. (Caveat: Are we in the “after” of the pandemic if the new COVID-19 1 variant is spreading like wildfire?)

What do you do with your parental anxiety?

There’s a lot more I can say about parental—and especially maternal—anxiety itself, but that’s the subject of a book. Several books. Perhaps a whole series.

But what I really want to talk about right now is what do you do with your parental anxiety or how does your parental anxiety appear or manifest?

Anxiety is sometimes called a disorder where “worry gets out of control,” which I think perfectly explains why I find myself doing things that help me to control my environment during bouts of heightened anxiety.

Let me explain.

My husband often makes fun of me because I can spend two hours organizing our upstairs pantry that’s full of all the extra snacks, pastas, sauces, drinks, spices, and all the random cooking crap that we don’t use daily. A lot of the time, things that end up here tend to come from my monthly Costco shopping trips or if I see a really good deal on something we often eat at my local grocery store.

I used to say that I do this because I love organizing but I’ve come to realize recently that the reason I love this activity is that it soothes me. And not just “oh, this makes me feel relaxed” but more like “this helps to calm my body when my nervous system is activated due to heightened anxiety.”

I never before realized that what my anxiety wants is for me to have a sense of control when so much of what I am experiencing are things I can’t control.

Case in point: My son got the flu and COVID-19 shots on Friday afternoon, and he experienced side-effects of the vaccine on Saturday with a sore thigh (at the injection site), body aches, and a mild fever. All of this was expected. But what we didn’t expect is for him to sleep until 11:30am on Sunday and wake up with his eyes, well, totally shut.

It was a really horrific little moment because his eyes, especially one of them, looked swollen and had dry yellow pus all over the eyelashes. We had never experienced this and were worried that he had pink eye.

After a while, we were able to remove most of the gunk from his eyelashes and, an hour later, he was happily relaxing in bed and watching TV. We talked to his pediatrician’s nurse and, based on his symptoms, it seems that he has a mild eye infection since he didn’t have any other symptoms other than waking up with the dry pus (yes, gross, I know).

The nurse also told us to keep a watch on him and call our doctor in the morning, especially if his symptoms changed or increased—such as having the eye pus start coming during the day. Well.. it did, but only a little bit. Then, in the evening, he developed a fever. And boy did I start to worry!

This January has been absolutely rife with sickness and staying at home. After him having a couple of colds earlier in January, a 2-day stomach bug, and then five days of the flu a couple of weeks ago, I was particularly concerned over how my husband and I would balance work if Rio’s sick and has to stay home yet again.

Perhaps worrying about our jobs seems minor considering that our child was sick, but as two working parents who live paycheck-to-paycheck due to insane childcare costs (with me still not earning enough money for our family’s basic needs even though I finally got a job after 11 months of unemployment), it’s a huge deal when we have to stay home and manage meetings and our individual workloads around a sick kiddo who is often clingy or wanting to play during moments when medications kick in and his fever goes down.

And so, last night, while worrying about him being sick again on Monday morning, my anxiety manifested in me wanting to go out and buy shelving for his toys. Why? Well, because it was something I could control in the moment.

As someone with anxiety, I worry a lot and I know that I would be worrying whether or not I had a child. But the added pressure of caring for another little human—and all of the love we feel for our kids that makes us want to do the best job ever as parents—certainly makes me worry a fuckton more.

And what do I do with that worry? Well, I for one seem to take my worry and turn it into some sort of action. Or rather, I use action—usually some sort of organizing that honestly isn’t even the most important organizing I should be doing—as a coping mechanism.

Which, considering that I used to drink as a coping mechanism for my then-undiagnosed anxiety, is a pretty good coping mechanism these days.

Did rushing out at night to buy my son a shelving unit to organize his beloved toys do anything to help his sickness? No, not even remotely.

But did it make me feel better in the moment and at least (even if subconsciously) make me feel that I could control something—make something easier in his life and mine? Yes, yes it did.

So now I want to ask, what has your experience been with parental anxiety? Do you find that you have certain coping mechanisms or ways to alleviate the anxiety? Are these coping mechanisms or your self-soothing done consciously or subconsciously? I’d love to hear from all of you!

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Talk soon,

Irina (she/her) - raising a March 2020 Gen Alpha kid