Answering Anxiety

Too many children today suffer from serious anxiety, and parents are not in great shape either. It did not used to be this way. This unfortunate trend is well documented by academics such as Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation, and it is apparent to anyone working in education who has their eyes open. The explosive increase in childhood mental health challenges over the past few decades, notably anxiety, affects most of the members of a school community in one way or another.

The Causes and Context of Anxiety

The causes of this crisis are complex. There are many factors that have been correlated to anxiety, and most people agree that no one factor is decisive by itself. There are strong correlations between technology use and anxiety. Social media, in particular, is known to have a dark side. Societal pressures such as competitive college admissions and competition for selective professional opportunities are a source of anxiety for both children and parents. Some, perhaps disillusioned with the current political climate, go so far as to say that the national and global structures in place are precarious: in short, that it is reasonable to worry about catastrophes on the horizon. They argue that it is understandable and to some extent inevitable that people are depressed and anxious. Others point to obvious behavioral changes, such as children spending less time outside in nature and more time sitting. Children used to have meaningful work to do to support the family—tending the garden, taking care of the chickens, chopping firewood, helping in the kitchen, and caring for younger siblings—but it is difficult, given modern conveniences, for parents to find worthwhile chores for their children. And some wonder about environmental factors like diet, contamination of drinking water, the prevalence of plastics, and interrupted sleep.

While it is difficult to know the relative importance of any one anxiety-causing factor, particularly for any one individual, it is possible for parents to address this societal crisis. The obvious ways include establishing a reasonable culture of technology use in the home and among family members. This is well known to savvy parents and dealt with elsewhere (for example, see my article “Technology Use in the Home”). Diet, exercise, and chores are other factors at least partly under the control of parents. It is possible even today to encourage children to embark on adventures and to find meaningful work for them to do around the house. Our high school age children have independently gone on overnight backpacking and bikepacking trips. Likewise, we have creatively found ways for children to contribute to the home economy, such as gathering and cutting firewood for our woodstove. Achievements do not need to be large to give a child a sense of accomplishment. My wife recently told me about a seven-year-old who went into a fast food restaurant to order for himself while his mother waited just outside. He was so nervous his knees were shaking, but he succeeded and was proud of himself. Small accomplishments can go a long way in helping to develop a sense that one is capable, that it is possible to navigate the world’s challenges, all which makes one more at home in the world and less prone to anxiety.

The Family Dynamics of Anxiety

As important as all these practical anxiety-reducing strategies are, reflective parents know that anxiety is also related to family relationships and expectations. Such parents also know that they can be part of the problem through subtle ways they put additional pressure on their children. A child tends to measure himself or herself against the standard set by his or her parents.

One of my daughters—who had an independent, strong spirit and had deeply internalized the best values of our family, making them her own—was having a difficult senior year of high school, and was particularly upset about math. She expressed frustration that the course had stopped covering Calculus material and instead was focused exclusively on prep for the AP exam. The teacher was assigning extensive packets of AP prep problems, problems that would easily take hours each night to complete if done well. My daughter’s complaints were growing in frequency and intensity. My facile attempts to encourage her to not worry about the math class did little to help the situation. I could tell that something was not right. I prayed and thought deeply about this situation until it occurred to me that I was basically part of the problem. It was not anything that I had consciously done, it was more who I was and how she wanted to live up to the standard I set. The mere facts that I am a math teacher, that math comes easily to me, and that I genuinely enjoy studying math all put indirect pressure on my daughter. After a considerable amount of prayer and consultation with my wife, I pulled my daughter aside and offered her a new way to consider the situation. I offered perspective as a fraternal correction of sorts. I suggested that her work in math was ceasing to be truly opus Dei—that is, the work of God, work offered up to God—and instead was in danger of becoming opus diabolum—that is, work done out of impure motives, work that, as harsh as it might sound, is really little more than work of the devil. I suggested that she was too attached to the situation. Sure, it is unfortunate that so much time is being spent on practicing AP problems instead of real learning. This is unfortunate, but it does not warrant becoming overly upset. The solution I suggested was for her to basically stop doing her Calculus homework—as a conscious strategy to act against her human tendency to invest herself in the work in a disordered way. The plan going forward was for her to not do any assigned AP prep problems and accept the failing grades that result. By doing this, I basically gave her permission to become detached in a healthy way from the class, and more importantly, very much let her know that the most important thing for me is that she sanctifies her work, that she does it with the right human perspective as well as with a supernatural motive, that she offers it up to God—and that I do not really care if she earns a good grade through completing an unreasonable amount of work.

The problem is that parents cause anxiety in their children. Even without saying anything, simply because of who we are, we can end up putting significant pressure on our children. How could we not? It is not enough to avoid saying things that add to the pressure, which, incidentally, can be difficult to do. A parent might be worried about whether a child is working to his or her potential and, specifically, if he or she will be admitted to selective colleges. It is difficult for a parent with these concerns not to put additional pressure on their children. Even if such parents successfully avoid mentioning those concerns, their children will likely pick up on them by the way we look at them or even the way we are silent, avoiding certain subjects at particular times. Our children know us too well.

Solutions

The solution is for us parents to stop playing a defensive game but instead to go on the offense. The deeper problem causing anxiety is a disordered relationship with work. Parents become part of the solution when they mentor their children to properly order their work toward the right ends. There are several things children need to hear from their parents in this regard. The first is that we are all called to be saints, to be close friends of God, and that the normal way this happens is through sanctifying the ordinary events of daily life, including sanctifying one’s work. Children need to hear from their parents that all honest human endeavors can be the grist for encountering the divine. As St. Josemaría wrote, “God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it” (Passionately Loving the World). The reality of the universal call to holiness and apostolate needs to be consciously placed in the heart of one’s family culture. Families who do this take a tremendous amount of pressure to achieve in unrealistic ways off their children, and instead give their children the freedom to commit themselves to discover their professional vocation, the unique way they are called to order this world toward God’s will.

The second line of attack is for us parents to focus less on results than on what it practically means to sanctify one’s work. This is very much doable. Parents struggling with their own anxiety over a child’s future can actually do something constructive by focusing on the here and now. They can ask their child if he or she is in the habit of saying a morning offering. The morning offering is a powerful prayer. Even if we do not consciously seek to encounter God in our daily work and the events of our day, by simply saying a morning offering, we have already added a supernatural intention to all our daily tasks. God honors this intention, and while ideally we should consciously raise our minds and hearts to Him many times each day, He still contemplates us living out our day in a richer way if we make a morning offering to Him.

There is much more that savvy and faithful parents can say to their children: “Son, when you do your school work, keep in mind that it is your professional work, the beginning of your contribution in society and in supporting others, perhaps even your own family if marriage is your calling. It is important to try to do your work well and for the right intentions, even on a human level. But as Christians our work is also a way to participate with Christ as He redeems this world. By work we order things on a natural level, but we also can add our small part to Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. Our desk can be thought of as an altar where we offer up our simple efforts, done with loving intention, to God. This type of work done for supernatural motives can help many people, winning graces for others to grow closer to God.”

In recommending that parents proceed in this way, I am not recommending a mere psychological hack to fight anxiety. If we parents believe that God exists, that He is the supreme Lord of the Universe, that His transcendence is such that He is so unlike anything we can imagine, that He is truly capable of and interested in contemplating all His children in all we do—then our children cannot mistake our words as empty. They will be consistent with our fundamental stance toward reality. The first step for us parents is for us to see reality rightly, and if this means crying out to God, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” then so be it. If this means that we need to commit to praying more, then so be it. God will accept our efforts and multiply them. He is not outdone in generosity.

The Crisis of Meaning

But I do want to make clear that this is an effective solution because the crisis of anxiety is also a crisis of meaning that plagues our young people, and all of us. In saying that the solution is to place God first, in a practical way, I’m saying little more than what Pope St. John Paul II often repeated, that the mystery of man is intimately related to the mystery of God, such that if we lose sight of God, the net effect is the degradation of the human person. And failing to see a transcendent horizon of meaning to the most material details of human work is to not only fail to see work for what it really is, it is to fall into a closed materialist outlook that, by excluding the God-given meaning to the material reality before us, ends up injuring our humanity as well. To state all of this more positively, to restore God to His central place in the ordinary tasks of our daily lives is to restore integrity and to heal the crisis of meaning we face. This, true even on the natural level, is even more profoundly true for those who believe in Christ, the one who (to borrow another often repeated phrase from John Paul II) “reveals man to himself.”

My daughter was initially surprised by my correction and advice. But she saw right away that my reframing of the situation in terms of her relationship with work was correct. She also saw that my practical recommendation to rectify the situation—that she simply stop doing her homework—was, though strong, a potentially effective surgical strike at the deeper problem. So she stopped doing her Calculus homework and accepted the failing grades that resulted. Her teacher was somewhat baffled but didn’t question her too extensively. The result was immediate. Her anxiety over the class completely disappeared. She devoted a reasonable amount of time on her own terms to keep working toward mastery of the Calculus material. And, more importantly, she was sanctifying her work, doing it with a lively awareness of the presence of God. She was happy and uncomplicated again. In the end, her teacher ended up collating all the homework grades as counting for a quiz grade and then dropped the lowest quiz grade. My daughter’s one disappointment, she says today, is that not doing her homework really did not impact her grade for the course. She would rather have earned a lower grade so she had something tangible to offer for her restored integrity.

Further Reading and Resources

• Review of Bad Therapy by Mark Grannis
• Review of The Anxious Generation and Bad Therapy featuring Dr. Kevin Majeres
• Reframing Anxiety featuring Dr. Kevin Majeres
• His Anxiety and Ours featuring Alex Berthé
• Unanxious Leadership featuring Colin Gleason
• Smartphones Aren’t the Problem by George Martin
• Dumb Phones, Feature Phones, and the New Tech Landscape featuring Alvaro de Vicente
• Hopeful Parents, Hopeful Sons by Alvaro de Vicente