«I'm just worried about you!»

Are worries an expression of love? I think so: as parents, we love our children with all our hearts and feel responsible for them. We care for their survival, want them to be happy, make friends and achieve their goals.

When they are still small, we stand by their beds and get anxious when they lie still and motionless: «Are you still breathing?» We may have nightmares about something happening to our children, be a little nervous ourselves when they go to nursery or school and find it difficult to fall asleep when they are teenagers or young adults out with friends in the evening.

What we should always check is how we deal with our worries and how they affect our children. Do they help to avert real dangers from our children? Or do they have the exact opposite effect and put our children under unnecessary pressure?

Responsible for parents' happiness?

Many parents today have a very close, loving relationship with their children. They want to do a good job, be there for their child, encourage and support them and feel responsible for their child's future. In counselling sessions and seminars, these parents always assure me that they don't want to put any pressure on their children, they just want them to do well. They comfort the child when it comes home with a bad grade and reassure it that it will certainly do better next time.

At the same time, they are desperate themselves. These parents often study for hours with their children, prepare them intensively for exams and get caught up in homework battles. They build up the conviction: For my child to do well, he or she must do well at school. And it's our responsibility to make sure they do!

Children build up an unconscious conviction: I have to do well at school so that my parents will do well!

The children in turn feel: My parents are totally stressed, they can't handle it when I fail! In this way, the children build up an unconscious conviction: I have to do well at school so that my parents do well! I am responsible for my parents' happiness! That's a burden that children shouldn't have to take on.

Please just trust me!

Constant worry about whether the child will be successful in life, have the right friends and not stray from the right path is often experienced by children and young people as deep mistrust. Let the sentence «I'm just worried about you!» sink in for a moment. What does it mean to you when someone says this to you?

You will probably conclude from this that you are important to the other person - but also that the other person has the feeling that something is wrong with you or that they don't trust you. Adults whose parents worried a lot often describe how they constantly felt they had to prove something to their parents and how the feeling of never being good enough hauntedthem into adulthood.

What helps against too many worries?

«Should I just stay out of it when everything goes down the drain?» is often the defiant, angry response when someone is told that he or she worries too much. Sometimes parents swing from one extreme to the other: «Well then, I'll just say nothing at all.» This is not helpful - neither for the parents nor for the child.

In counselling sessions, I have often noticed that it is beneficial when parents stop fixating on the outcome or the potential disaster and instead ask themselves: What is my responsibility in this situation and what is not? How do I want to define my role? What can I do specifically and what can or will I not influence? And where do I jump over my shadow, face my fears and consciously relinquish control?

Some parents see their child's grades as a reflection of their parenting skills.

Let's take school as an example: parents often unconsciously believe that they are only good parents if their child is successful at school. This view leads them to see their child's grades as a reflection of their parenting skills and to react angrily, disappointed or unsettled if the results are not right.

At the end of a counselling session, a mother has defined for herself: I am a good mum when I am there for my child, when I pick them up when they are sad or disappointed. My daughter experiences a lot of negative feelings at school. She doesn't need a stressed tutor at home, but a mum who believes that she will make her way even without top marks, who makes sure that there is enough time and space for her strengths and hobbies and who doesn't allow homework and exam preparation to poison our relationship. We can read together for 15 minutes a day, look for better learning strategies and plan exam preparation. But I will no longer allow a bad grade to dominate our family life for days on end.

Perhaps your statement would be completely different, but: as soon as you think about what you want to take responsibility for and where you want to consciously let go, you are once again the captain of your own ship and set the course instead of anxiously staring at the waves.

The fear has nothing to do with you!

Especially with older children and adolescents, it is sometimes helpful to talk openly if you tend to worry often and about all sorts of things. Very well-adjusted young people with fine antennae often have the feeling that their parents could finally relax if they could just prove to them that all their worries are unfounded. Then it can be relieving when the child hears: «This has nothing to do with you! I would worry in any case, no matter what you do or achieve, because I see danger lurking everywhere. You can't protect me from that and you don't need to try.»