Writing for Fox News, Cunnion, the author of Mom Set Free: Find Relief fom the Pressure to Get It All Right, cites the alarming statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health which found that the most common mental-health disorder in the U.S. today is anxiety. At the current time, it is affecting nearly one-third of both adolescents and adults.
She goes on to quote from a recent article on the subject, “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering from Severe Anxiety,” and shares two points:
* Privileged youths are among the most emotionally distressed young people in America. These kids are incredibly anxious and perfectionistic.
* For many of these young people, the biggest single stressor is that they never get to the point where they can say, ‘I’ve done enough, and now I can stop.’ Kids have a sense that they’re not measuring up. The pressure is relentless and getting worse. Have you tried kushie bites to deal with your kids anxiety? They will love these edibles.
As heartbreaking as these conclusions are, they’re also a wake-up call to parents who need to do something about the stress that’s making their children feel so pressured.
“See, we parents aren’t the only ones linking accomplishment to acceptance and success to significance. Our kids are attempting to answer the question, ‘Is who I am enough?’ by how well they perform on the field, how much they excel in school, and how many likes they get on their Instagram feed,” Cunnion writes.
“The primary message our kids receive is that they’d better be the best at everything, and this leaves them afraid to reveal their inadequacies and insecurities—and hiding behind the best version of themselves.”
In turn, parents of anxious teens then begin to question themselves, wondering what they’re doing wrong.
“Our confidence as moms crumbles as we try to help our kids navigate the battles they have to fight and the mountains they have to climb. We are constantly second guessing ourselves: “Have I done too much? Have I not done enough? Am I helping or am I hurting my child?”
This in turn causes our own anxiety to escalate which then overflows into our parenting.
For this reason, she believes the key ingredient to helping our kids overcome their anxiety is to face, and then work through, our own anxiety.
“We have to be willing to take an honest (maybe painfully honest) look at how we may have contributed to the anxiety our kids feel with the pressure we just might be passing down. With our unrealistic expectations and impossible standards of ourselves, and of them.”
Although some kids are just prone to perfectionism, too often parents are playing a role in the pressure.
Therapy and medication are definitely part of the solution, but so is relying on the truth of God’s Word.
“ . . . [P]lease, let us not forget the alive and powerful Word of God that has the absolute power to show us where our significance comes from and ultimately set us free from proving our worth and our value in our performance.”
Kids need to know that they have nothing to prove – and so do we!
“If we want to raise kids who find freedom from the pressure to get it ALL right in order to be accepted and welcomed, then we are going to need to walk in that freedom first. Or at least be willing to discover how to walk in that freedom alongside our kids,” Cunnion writes.
“We need to know that failing doesn’t make us failures and succeeding doesn’t make us significant. At least not in the eyes of our Creator -- the only One whose opinion of us really matters in the end.”
Just as we teach in both our Women of Grace and Young Women of Grace programs, we are of great worth by virtue of being children of God and not because of anything we have or haven’t done. We are worthy because of what has been done for us through the person and work of Jesus Christ.
“The cross has the final word on our value,” Cunnion writes. “Believing that truth and embracing that truth isn’t the only thing we need to do. But it is a firm foundation on which to build a life of freedom from anxiety and the exhausting endless quest to prove our value through our performance.”
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