Parenting through the biggest, darkest fear

TW: We do discuss teen suicide and suicidal ideation herein.

I was sitting through an initial session with a mom and dad of a fifteen-year-old boy and a seventeen-year-old girl recently. We were talking through the typical things that come up early in therapy, most of them based in our fears as parents these days: grades poor enough to impede their futures, the potential for isolation and depression, deterioration of family relationships, school shootings, fentanyl.

And this couple did what so many parents of teenagers do today. Dad tracks the blue dots on the Find My app nearly constantly, he realized as we were talking. He tracks obsessively. I asked him what he was looking for while staring at the dots, and he told me he wasn’t entirely sure. He said he feared there might be danger for them outside a certain geographical radius, but he could not identify those parameters very well. He could breathe easier if one of those dots was stationary at a house he was familiar with, one of the good friends, the good kids. But a moving dot is okay too sometimes. Because that means they’re out there, moving.

Or at least, he realized in real time, their phone was moving. Laughing a little, he recognized that he forgot that that dot wasn’t actually his kid.

It was a nervous laugh.

Recognizing the session was becoming a bit of a confessional, Mom offered that she tracks grades online every day. Actually, by the end of the conversation, she admitted she checked several times a day. She checked balances in bank accounts. She stalks social media through her own Finsta account, a new one for me. If she was worried about something in particular: drug use, sexual activity, or anything else that might prove dangerous or harmful, she would reach out to parents, and sometimes other kids, her own kids’ friends, to collect information.

They both felt the need to gather intel nearly constantly.

I could tell this hour was difficult for this couple. Their own emotional well-being felt fragile as glass. Their anxieties about their kids were so high. And I could tell they were recognizing something that beneath the surface of their consciousness, they’ve known for years.

That is, they have very little control over their teenagers’ emotional, and even physical, well-being. So, this mom and dad, who had ostensibly come to my office to make sure that their kids were okay emotionally, realized that they themselves were not. Mom:

“Raising teenagers today is fraught. I realize we are both so anxious all the time, and we have so little control. We know we’re kidding ourselves with frenetic, anxious activity by tracking and calling and checking. We’re scared and we’re exhausted.”

I am sometimes accused of laying blame for any emotional difficulties teens might suffer at the feet of their parents. It’s not fair, and I get it. Most of the advice I offer involves parenting more effectively, being more present and available to your kids, suggesting that maybe we aren’t in this moment right now, showing up as our best selves, our most effective and available parent.

But I think we parenting experts too often fail to recognize the degree to which anxiety is driving the parenting of teenagers today, how freakin’ scary the entire venture has become.

I had to really consider whether to include this next part, but it’s crucial, so here we go.

I asked this couple what their biggest fear was with regard to their teenagers. Nearly in unison, they said:

“We’re afraid they’re going to die.”

Dad:

“I’m desperately afraid we’re going to lose one or both of them, either accidentally or by suicide.”

This is the very darkest side of parenting, the part we don’t want to talk about, the quiet part that disrupts our sleep and our peace of mind.

What an absolute horror to have to consider, ever.

And honestly, this is a newly-unlocked fear.

When we get down to the depth of parental fears today, and there are plenty of them, death is underlying nearly all of them. This rather recent shift in thinking accompanies a phenomenon I find to be quite healthy: we are talking far more about teen suicide and prevention, the risks affiliated with isolation, depression, hopelessness, and drug abuse. These are important discussions. This is progress.

It’s crucial that we talk about all of these risks, with each other and with our kids. But there’s also a deep, sharp, fully understandable reluctance.

Because it’s terrifying. And if we’re being honest, we worry that our kids may be a tad suggestible, that planting the seed of the idea of suicide, or suicidal ideation, opens a previously locked door. That the very discussion of drug use will manifest abuse. The last thing we want to do is open their young minds to these dark thoughts.

I’m finding that, once we get into parent therapy or coaching, this is now the fear that underlies virtually every parenting move. It breaks my heart for parents today, especially since we who parented teens previously rarely if ever experienced the terror of that thought passing through our minds.

I never once worried about George dying. And my parents never concerned themselves with the potential death of any of their kids.

Which, as you likely know, may well have been a mistake.

Full disclosure, I think my very presence in the therapy room may invite this parental fear into the fore. By this point in my career, most new clients know I’ve been directly affected by suicide in my own family, and know the very worst outcome of their fears.

It’s in the room.

What I tend to tell them is this, and I’m hoping you can carry this thought with you as you forge your path as the parent of a teenager:

“Yes, we went through the worst as a family. So looking back at my family history as a professional, applying a little forensic science, we could have done things differently, better. Perhaps we could have prevented Tom’s death by suicide altogether.”

“But the way there would have had nothing to do with an app, or with tracking, or with worry. Ridiculous as it may sound, it would have been through attentiveness, recognition and appreciation of his gifts and differences, managing the urge to change his core to be more conventional. It would have been through availability and unconditional love, simply.”

Those are the things we withheld from Tom. And I think we unwittingly created the circumstances under which his life was in peril.

If you apply those principles, can I guarantee the safety of your child? Man, I so wish I could offer an unmitigated yes here. But of course I cannot. But can I say, with a certainty borne by experience, that you will minimize that risk of death by suicide, suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety and the like if you practice these relatively simple principles?

No doubt.

And there is no small benefit for you and your family in these practices. You’re afforded some precious peace of mind, first of all. And you may be less inclined to track, to call, to panic, to assume and envision the very worst, all to have your teenager walk through the front door perfectly fine, while you’re just catching your breath, secretly relieved to see them alive again. You may be able to recoup your time, your unfurrowed brow, your peace of mind.

But there’s more.

Because you as parents are not the only ones who will benefit from this admittedly dramatic shift in perspective. Your kids benefit as well. They carry freedom to be themselves, without feeling that press to hide from you their true nature, that I so wish my family had afforded Tom.

Because when we breathe deeply and appreciate our kids for who they are, they feel every bit of that acceptance and appreciation. They are keenly aware of that unmitigated, unconditional love. And unlike some kids who experience deep depression or worse, your kids will feel less alone, as if they have parents to turn to when things go south in one way or another, as they undoubtedly will.

Imagine this shift.

You no longer feel the exhausting need to police them and track them and submit them to the third degree.

To recap, providing support and unconditional love affords you the chance to breathe easy, and ease your fears. Curiously, the same approach affords your children the same. Win-win.

I want to say I didn’t want to write about this phenomenon, but I really, really did. It feels important and relevant. It feels like the thing I know best that stunningly few other people may be privy to. It feels like peeking underneath the most frightening veil. It feels like the kind of thing that can save a life.