As my daughter dangled ten feet above the ground, her legs wrapped around the thick, smooth trunk of a vine in the middle of the Belize jungle, I stood beneath her, wondering how far she was from solid ground, a paved road, and the nearest hospital.
Of course, that wasn’t on my agenda for that day. We were on a mission trip to western Belize visiting a small village with friends from our church who have been coming to the same town every year for over a decade. Our mission was to help in the village school, support community development projects, share the love of Jesus, and deepen friendships with people who live in a completely different cultural context than we do.
It was this last part that got my daughter into the tree. We went for a morning walk to see some little-known Mayan ruins, but detoured to a no-harness jungle adventure course run by Julio, our local friend in Crocs, who clearly didn’t find it alarming to let a child climb freely.
Back home in the U.S., we worry about our children constantly. It’s well-documented and widely accepted that smartphones, social media, and a lack of independence and free play in childhood are contributing to creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called the “anxious generation.” But in all this collective hand-wringing, we tend to overlook a closely related and equally pervasive problem: uncontrolled, socially normalized parental anxiety and the stifling parenting style that results.
There is nothing new under the sun, and I’m sure that to some extent, this applies to parental worries too. Throughout history, parents have feared losing their children to illness, accidents or violence. While I currently worry about volleyball team tryouts and first-day-of-school nerves, mothers all over the world worry about bombs and bullets, famine and front lines.
The problem for the relatively comfortable, like us, seems to be what we do with our worries. Our parenting strategies successfully alleviate our own fears, but that doesn’t mean they meet the developmental needs of our children. We disempower our children instead of helping them grow into competent, confident adults. We interpret excessive worry as a sign of love and treat our pursuit of security and comfort like whipped cream on hot chocolate: if something is good, more is surely better.
Across political and social lines, for example, parents are among the fiercest opponents of banning smartphones in schools, despite mountains of evidence that they interfere with instruction. The reasoning? Safety and convenience. Smartphones give us the previously unimaginable ability to know where our children are at all times. We imagine saving them from a school shooting – or, far more realistically, from the consequences of a forgotten lunchbox.
And phones aren’t everything. We pile up warning after warning: halved grapes and five-point harnesses give way to AirTag tracking and obsessive grade checking. With all our fidgeting and fixating and worrying, we’re inadvertently telling our kids that the world is a dangerous place they can’t cope with without our ever-present help.
But we are wrong when we talk about our pursuit of security. More is not better. We have a generation of fearful children, in part because we are a generation of fearful parents. However good our intentions, we have harmed a generation because our risk calibrators are broken. We desperately seek protection from rare dangers while paying little attention to the cascade of far more likely, worse consequences that our own parenting has created.
In some cases, course correction may require professional help to get our own anxiety under control. But beyond the clinical realm, there is a more common anxiety, the kind of chronic worry that all modern parents know, whether of ourselves or of our peers. And in this respect, most Western Christians are no different from the rest of the world.
We are just as anxious as our worldly neighbors, and our upbringing is just as overprotective. This fact should give us pause when we consider what Jesus said about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. (Matt. 6:25-34) What we call caution, God may call sin: a desire for control and a refusal to trust God with the children He has entrusted to us.
For Christians, this issue is also different because we can recognize what other parents cannot: that the challenge we face is, at its core, far more spiritual and existential than practical and procedural.
I know this firsthand. My older daughter started eighth grade at her public middle school this month. I get the lockdown emails from her campus. Every morning I see her enter the building, along with all the kids carrying invisible burdens and God knows what else in their backpacks, and I have to swallow my fear. I have to push away the intrusive thoughts that suggest this might be the last time I ever see her.
As my girls grow older and their lives move further out of my orbit into a world of disarray and chaos, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, feeling like I’m standing on the edge of a precipice, clutching my daughters’ hands to keep them from falling. In the light of day, I know I can’t have a backup plan to escape from all the tragedies or hardships that could befall our family. Yet in the darkest of nights, it seems like I can’t stop trying.
Two things can be true at the same time: These sleep-disturbing fears are real and profound, AndAs Christians, we don’t have to let them consume us.
We – I – must begin with confession. The illusion of control is a most enchanting elixir, but it will never satisfy. We must admit that we know this to be true and that we have sought control anyway. Perhaps this honesty will make us more willing to turn to Jesus.
“In this world you have tribulation” (John 16:33). In his last sermon on earth, Jesus made this promise to his disciples. It applies to us too. This verse is not on signs at the local Christian bookstore, but perhaps it should be. It is our own peril if we ignore God’s promise of weeping, mourning, and sorrow in this world.
Spending so much time and worry avoiding trouble is not only unrealistic; it is a rejection of Christ’s invitation to trust in the hope he offers us, no matter what our circumstances. It is a rejection of the rest of this verse: “Be of good cheer,” Jesus commands. “I have overcome the world.”
But what does it look like when we trust and take courage? We must combine our confession with genuine repentance. We must surrender and face each day, no matter what, with the confidence of little ones who know that their Father gives them good gifts. (Luke 11:13)
This is the first lesson in child-rearing in Jesus’ life, taught in Mary’s prayer when she learns that she will give birth to the Son of God: “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38, NRSV). This is a “true prayer of indifference,” says minister and author Ruth Haley Barton, in which Mary demonstrates a “deep willingness to set aside her own personal concerns in order to participate in the will of God as it unfolds in human history.”
This kind of holy indifference does not mean apathy, but a willingness to accept God’s will in our lives. The term dates back to the 16th-century theologian Ignatius of Loyola, but the concept has deep biblical roots. We see it in Hannah’s renunciation of her son Samuel in the temple (1 Sam. 1:28) and in Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). As Barton advises, sometimes a prayer from Indifference must begin with a prayer for Indifference by asking God to help us loosen our grip on what we want to hold on to.
In Belize, I heard Julio’s calm voice as he helped my daughter descend the vine. “Let go,” he said, encouraging her to slide down the vine even though she couldn’t yet see where her feet would land. It was as if his words suddenly startled me awake. Let go. Let go. Let go.
It wasn’t Julio who exposed my child to undue risk and worry. It was me who did that – by allowing her a life of select experiences and limited responsibility, by replacing real-life adventures with online ones, by making her daily hustle and bustle and motherly helpfulness a habit, and by reminding her almost constantly to be careful. Dear Jesus, help me to let go.
As I watched them, I realized that the best thing I could do in that moment was to control my own nervous energy. And as I compare that moment to life at home, I’m more and more convinced that’s exactly what our children need from us. Because when my daughter was back on solid ground, I saw something new flash in her eyes. It was a spark of accomplishment and confidence, I thought, after she had practiced the confidence I pray to learn.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas-based author whose works have appeared in The New York Times, The AtlanticAnd Texas monthly Magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
