They say you are only as happy as your least happy child, to which a very wise psychotherapist friend of mine often replies: your children do not exist to make you happy, you exist to do that, so get on with it. It’s a rather harsh parenting pill that I have had to swallow: in our house, as in so many others, childhood anxiety reared its ugly head during the pandemic, and I felt miserable about it because I just want my child to feel good. But I also have a tendency to err into a place of guilt and blame myself for my child’s anxiety. Maybe if I wasn’t such a gigantic screw-up, she’d be happy all the time? Is this anxiety a sign that I am a terrible parent?

That’s my own anxiety talking there, just in case you were wondering.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about childhood anxiety, in part because of personal experience, but also because earlier this month, research by the Oxford University Press found that ‘anxiety’ was children’s word of the year for 2021. This made for grim headlines and lots of commentary about how Covid has ruined the lives of an entire generation.

But there was part of me – the non-anxious part, so to speak – that welcomed this news, because the fact that children are able to identify their anxiety at all, let alone talk about it, is a huge step forward when it comes to them being mentally well. As Helen Freeman, OUP’s director of early childhood, said: “The findings demonstrate the role we all play in making sure children have the words they need to be able to express themselves and that, as adults, we are aware the language we use around children can significantly influence their learning and wellbeing.”

Anxiety is your brain’s response to stress. And pandemics are stressful, so it’s natural that a lot of kids have been feeling anxious lately. The problems come when kids don’t feel able to talk about their anxiety when they have no useful coping mechanisms to deal with it. Then, anxiety can come out sideways, in any number of unhelpful and disruptive ways. If your child is coming to you to tell you they aren’t feeling right, you shouldn’t be freaking out that you’re a rubbish parent who has been unable to wrap them in a bubble and protect them from the world; you should actually be welcoming it, and perhaps even patting yourself on the back for creating an environment where your kid feels safe enough to talk to you about the bad stuff in their head.  

It’s OK for our children to be anxious! Maybe it’s even a tiny bit appropriate, given that they’ve had two years of disruption. Of course, childhood mental illness is another column entirely, one I will soon write, but childhood anxiety is something completely normal, that you can absolutely deal with at home. 

And so it is that I’ve come to see recent events as an opportunity to talk about anxiety with my daughter. There’s a whole range of books out there that you can buy for children to help them express their feelings, not to mention fantastic kids’ meditations on apps such as Insight Timer (my personal favourite because it is completely free). But just as important is what you are doing to help your anxiety about the situation. My favourite book for good parental mental health is Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, which I still refer to on an almost weekly basis, almost three years after first reading it. And in future, perhaps a better saying to remember is this: a child is only as happy as its least happy parent. Because modelling a healthy approach to life is the best way to set your child up for the future. 

A bright light amid the social media darkness

We all know that social media can be bad for your mental health… but given that it’s not going anywhere, how do we navigate it in a way that is good for us? In 2019, a report by the Mental Health Foundation suggested “deleting harmful/triggering content and ‘toxic people and pages’”, which essentially involves unfollowing accounts that send you into a cycle of comparison. If you’re even a smidgeon as insecure as I am, you may well wonder who, exactly, that leaves you to follow. And yet, if you will excuse the pretentious language I am about to use, I have found that ‘curating’ my Instagram feed has had a huge impact on my own wellbeing.