Parents Pass Their Anxieties to Their Kids

Do parents pass along anxiety to their kids through nature or nurture? A recent study says
in effect, yes. The research found that anxiety is not only genetically passed on from
parents to kids, but also through exposure to parents’ anxious tendencies.
Researchers found that anxiety could be transmitted from parent to child by observing the
parents’ fears or worries in their actions or overhearing their conversations. Kids would
then adopt those same worries. Parents also passed along their anxiety by unnecessarily
shielding their kids from something they feared.
On the flip side, parents were also found to perpetuate their children’s existing anxieties by
altering their parenting choices to allow their kids to avoid facing anxiety producing
experiences.
What Can Parents Do?
• Make the decision to meet your personal anxieties head-on, and develop healthy
strategies for coping with them. Evaluate your anxiety-levels, and identify your primary
anxieties. Do you have appropriate strategies for coping with your anxieties? If not, why
not? Your goal should be to make your home as emotionally stable and anxiety-free as
possible for your children.
• Consider the ways that your anxieties manifest themselves at home and in family life.
What examples are you providing your kids regarding how to deal with anxieties in life?
How can you improve your role modeling?
• Evaluate the extent to which you see your own anxieties being passed along to your
children. If you find that your kids have similar anxieties, be proactive in teaching and
practicing coping skills together.
• Try not to enable your children’s anxieties by helping them to avoid situations or
experiences that trigger them. For example, if your child fears visiting a dentist, delaying
dental care should not be a viable option. In the long run, it’s far better to help your kids
face their anxieties, resolve them whenever possible, or to teach healthy coping skills for
those that cannot be resolved.