As my daughter dangled 10 feet above the bottom, legs wrapped across the thick, smooth trunk of a vine in the course of the Belizean jungle, I stood below her and regarded how far she was from solid ground, a paved road, and the closest hospital.
Needless to say, this had not been on my agenda for the day. We were visiting a small village on a mission trip to western Belize with friends from our church who’ve been coming annually to the identical town for greater than a decade. Our task was to assist in the village school, support community development projects, share the love of Jesus, and deepen friendships with individuals who live in a very different cultural context from our own.
It was that last part that put my daughter up the tree. We took a morning walk to see some little-known Mayan ruins but detoured to a no-safety-harnesses jungle adventure course led by Crocs-wearing Julio, our local friend who clearly didn’t find it worrisome to let a baby free climb.
Back home within the States, we’re continually apprehensive about our youngsters. It’s well-documented and usually accepted that smartphones, social media, and an absence of childhood independence and free play contribute to creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt famously dubbed an “anxious generation.” But in all this collective handwringing, we are likely to overlook a closely related and equally pervasive problem: unchecked, socially normalized parental anxiety and the smothering parenting style it produces.
There’s nothing latest under the sun, and I’m sure, to some extent, that’s true of parental worries. Throughout the ages, parents have feared losing their children to sickness, accidents, or violence. Right now, while I worry about volleyball team tryouts and first day of college jitters, moms all over the world worry about bombs and bullets, famine and frontlines.
The problem of the relatively comfortable, like us, appears to be what we do with our worries. Our parenting strategies successfully soothe our own fears, but that doesn’t mean they meet our youngsters’s developmental needs. We disempower our youngsters as a substitute of helping them grow into competent, confident adults. We rebrand hyper-concern as proof of affection and treat our pursuit of safety and ease like whipped cream on hot chocolate: If some is sweet, surely more will likely be higher.
Across political and social divides, for instance, parents are among the many fiercest opponents to high school smartphone bans, despite the mountain of evidence telling us they’re disrupting education. The rationale? Safety and ease. Smartphones give us the previously unimaginable ability to know where our youngsters are at each moment. We envision ourselves rescuing them from a college shooting—or, way more realistically, rescuing them from the results of a forgotten lunchbox.
And phones aren’t all of it. We stack one caution on one other: halved grapes and five-point harnesses give option to AirTag tracking and compulsive grade checking. With all our hovering and fixing and fretting, we unintentionally tell our youngsters the world is a dangerous place they’re ill-equipped to administer without our ever-present help.
But we’re unsuitable in regards to the pursuit of safety. More isn’t higher. We have a generation of anxious children partially because we’re a generation of anxious parents. However good our intentions, we’ve harmed a generation because our risk calibrators are broken. We scramble for protection from rare dangers while paying little heed to the cascade of far more probable dire consequences our own parenting has created.
In some cases, course correction here may require skilled help to get our own anxiety under control. But beyond the clinical realm is a more garden-variety anxiety, the type of chronic worry that each one modern parents have seen, whether in ourselves or in our peers. And on this, most Western Christians look no different from the world.
We are only as anxious as our secular neighbors, and our parenting is just as overcautious. That reality should give us pause considering all Jesus said in regards to the birds of the air and lilies of the sector (Matt. 6:25–34). What we call caution, God may call sin: a clamoring for control and a refusal to trust God with the youngsters he has entrusted to us.
This issue can also be different for Christians because we are able to recognize what other parents cannot: that at its core, the challenge facing us is way more spiritual and existential than practical and procedural.
I do know this firsthand. My elder daughter began eighth grade at her public middle school this month. I get the lockdown emails from her campus. Each morning, I watch her walk into the constructing alongside all those kids carrying invisible burdens and God knows what else of their backpacks, and I actually have to swallow my fear. I actually have to dismiss the intrusive thoughts suggesting this will be the last time I’ll ever see her.
As my girls grow old and their lives spin ever further outside my orbit right into a world of disorder and chaos, I sometimes get up in the course of the night, heart pounding, feeling as if I’m standing on the sting of a precipice, clutching my daughters’ hands so that they don’t fall. In the rational light of day, I do know there’s no option to contingency plan my way out of all of the ways tragedy or hardship could visit our family. Yet within the deepest a part of those nights, it seems I can’t stop trying.
Two things might be true at the identical time: These sleep-disrupting anxieties are real and profound, and, as Christians, we do not need to be consumed by them.
We—I—must start with confession. The illusion of control is a most enchanting elixir, but it should never satisfy. We must admit that we all know that is true and that we’ve got pursued control anyway. Perhaps this honesty will make us more able to turn to Jesus.
“In this world you’ll have trouble” (John 16:33). In his final earthly sermon, Jesus made this promise to his disciples. It can also be for us. This is just not a verse emblazoned on plaques on the local Christian bookstore, but possibly it must be. It is at our peril that we disregard God’s guarantees of weeping and mourning and grief on this world.
To spend a lot time and worry attempting to avoid trouble is just not only unrealistic; it’s a rejection of Christ’s invitation to trust within the hope he offers regardless of our circumstances. It is a rejection of the remainder of this very verse: “Take heart!” Jesus commands. “I actually have overcome the world.”
But what does it seem like to trust and take heart? We must pair our confession with real repentance. We must give up and face each and every single day, come what may, with the trust of little ones who know their Father gives good gifts (Luke 11:13).
This is the primary parenting lesson within the lifetime of Jesus, given in Mary’s prayer upon hearing that she’s going to give birth to the Son of God: “Let it’s with me in response to your word” (Luke 1:38, NRSV). This is a “true prayer of indifference,” says pastor and writer Ruth Haley Barton, by which Mary demonstrates a “profound readiness to put aside her own personal concerns so as to take part in the desire of God because it unfolded in human history.”
This type of holy indifference doesn’t mean uncaring disregard but a willingness to simply accept God’s will in our lives. The term dates to the Sixteenth-century theologian Ignatius of Loyola, however the concept has deep scriptural roots. We see it in Hannah’s relinquishing her son Samuel on the temple (1 Sam. 1:28) and in Jesus within the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). As Barton advises, sometimes a prayer of indifference must start with a prayer for indifference, asking God to assist us loosen our grip on whatever we wish to carry too tightly.
In Belize, I listened to Julio’s calm voice as he guided my daughter’s descent down the vine. “Let go,” he said, encouraging her to slip down the vine, despite the fact that she couldn’t yet see where her feet would land. It was as if I used to be suddenly startled awake by his words. Let go. Let go. Let go.
Julio wasn’t the one exposing my child to inordinate risk and worry. I used to be—by giving her a lifetime of curated experiences and limited responsibilities, by trading in-real-life adventures for online ones, by making a habit of on a regular basis hovering and motherly helpfulness and near-constant reminders to watch out. Dear Jesus, help me let go.
Watching the 2 of them, I spotted the most effective thing I could do within the moment was get my very own nervous energy under control. And once I contrast that moment with life back home, I’m increasingly convinced that that is what our youngsters need from us. For when my daughter’s feet were planted firmly on the bottom over again, I saw something latest flash in her eyes. It was a spark of accomplishment and confidence, I assumed, after she’d practiced the trust I’m praying to learn.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
