It’s Possible to Parent Through Anxiety — Here’s How
By Movieguide® Contributor
Sadie Robertson Huff recently hosted “The Worry-Free Parent” author and therapist Sissy Goff to talk about how parents can help themselves and their kids by breaking the anxiety cycle.
“I think your book is such an incredible resource and the day-to-day, the practicality, the spiritual aspect, all of it,” Huff told Goff on Huff’s Aug. 7 podcast episode, “and I’m so thankful to be having this conversation and for your book because I’ve gotten a lot of counseling help to deal with the fear and anxiety that I’ve struggled with….I mean so many things that have helped me are in this book (The Worry-Free Parent).”
Goff has written and co-written many books for parents, including “Are My Kids On Track?” and “Taming the Technology Monster: 8 Guiding Principles for Raising Digital Natives.”
Goff said, “I did a deep dive on anxiety because it started with a book for elementary age girls and…the average age of onset used to be 8 now it’s dropped to 6, and so a lot of us, whether we’re parents or not, this started really earl,y and so I wrote a workbook called ‘Braver, Stronger, Smarter’ for little girls and an accompanying book for parents called ‘Raising Worry Free Girls,’ and literally they came out August before the pandemic started which I was so grateful for the timing of.”
In the pandemic, Goff was most concerned about adolescent girls. But now, after the pandemic, she’s most concerned about parents.
“The statistics have been climbing, but I think post-pandemic we are still stuck in a lot of anxiety,” Goff explained. “The statistics are one in four kids are dealing with anxiety. One in three adolescents. One in three adults, and women are twice as likely as men.”
“So it is so rampant in our culture,” Goff explained, “whatever station in life you’re in. And so I think I just am having more and more really thoughtful, conscientious parents who are saying, ‘I feel like I’m part of the problem, and I want to do my own work,’ and so I really wrote the book as an answer to that to say here’s some really practical things that you can do to find help and hope in the process of what’s going on.”
Huff suffered from immense anxiety on and off for her whole life.
Movieguide® reported how she overcame it:
“You’re going to feel the emotion of fear, that’s a normal thing, but there’s a difference in feeling it and almost like bowing to it and living in it. I think, you know, for a time in my life I was bowing to it, like fear was driving the ship of my life. If I felt afraid, I wasn’t doing it. If I felt afraid, I was getting out of the room,” Huff said.
… “This is not something new that people are anxious or people worry, I mean Jesus addressed it… over and over again. Old Testament, New Testament, so it’s not something new,” Robertson shared.
“God has an abundant life for us, he has a life and he tells us ‘do not fear for I am with you’. And you know when we are followers of Jesus he tells us, he’s like, I’m going and I’m leaving the spirit with you we have the spirit of God in us so we have we should be walking differently.”
She started to put the work in to be less anxious after she was told about a study on mice.
“They put like the scent of cherry blossom into their cage or whatever and when they did they would shock these mice so it would scare them,” Huff explained. “So they became…afraid of the smell of cherry blossom.”
Those mice had offspring who were also scared of the smell, even though they were never shocked. So the fear of cherry blossom was genetically passed down.
After Huff was told “that story, it was like everything in me…just snapped. Like, okay so my anxiety can one day affect the kids that I have and their anxiety, and then all of a sudden I was like give me all the help I can get, and that was before I was even a mom,” she said.
Goff said, “I think it’s so easy and especially probably for those of us who are perfectionists or want to do the right thing you know, I think it’s so easy to blame ourselves when things go wrong.”
But it’s important for parents to look at their own heart and what they want for their kids. Even if they mess up, they often do it for the right reasons.
Huff shared that she accidentally slammed her daughter Haven’s finger in their freezer. This happened when she was showing their nanny the fruit she bought so her daughters could have smoothies.
Huff felt fearful, anxious and guilty for the accident. But Goff told her she needed to remember that it was a complete accident, and the intention was good — she wanted her daughters to eat something they liked.
She said instead of self-blame, it’s better to think “I was trying to do something really sweet for my daughter.”
Last month, Huff shared three things she prays over her two young daughters:
– That every day of their life they would know they are loved. Loved by God and loved by their family.
– That they would be confident in who they were created to be. That they would know they are made originally and wonderfully!
– That they would always be surrounded by good people, and that they themselves would be a good friend to others.
