Here are some things that, over the course of the SPACE* training, I heard of parents doing to avoid setting off their anxious children:
Going upstairs to get a child’s backpack before school because the child is scared to be alone in any area of the house and the parent doesn’t have time to argue about it. Driving a child to school because the child is frightened of the bus, with the result that the mother is late to work every single day.
Tying and retying a child’s shoes until they feel just right.
Spending 30 minutes a day, on average, checking and rechecking a child’s homework.
Announcing one’s presence as one moves around the house, so that a child will at all times know where to find a parent (“I’m going to the kitchen, Oliver”). Accompanying a 9-year-old child to the toilet because he is afraid to be alone. Allowing a 9-year-old to accompany a parent to the toilet because he is afraid to be alone. Peeing in a bucket—a mother, not a child—because the basement playroom has no bathroom, and the child is afraid to be alone.
Allowing a child to sleep in the parents’ bed. Sitting or lying with a child while he falls asleep.
Always carrying a plastic bag because a child is afraid she’ll vomit.
Cutting a 13-year-old’s food because she’s afraid of knives.
Ceasing to have visitors because a child is intensely shy. Speaking for a child in restaurants. Asking a child’s teacher not to call on her in class.
Installing the Find My Friends app on a child’s phone so that the child can track the parents’ whereabouts.
Preparing different foods for a child because she won’t eat what everyone else eats.
Buying a new burglar alarm. Buying a new car. Seriously contemplating buying a new house.
The list went on and on. The most disorienting thing about it was not its length, but the way it merged stories that seemed to me bizarre but turned out to be commonplace with stories that sounded familiar but upon further consideration seemed unhealthy. Many of us think nothing of preparing different meals for different family members. Bedtime has become such a protracted affair that parents may now do the work a stuffed animal once did.
I barely suppressed a laugh at the idea of a kid tracking his parents, rather than vice versa, but murmurs of recognition sounded around the room. “That’s common,” one therapist said. The idea of buying a new house must have made my eyebrows go up, because another woman leaned over and whispered: “I have a family that moved to a split-level because the daughter didn’t like to be out of earshot.”...
We all have dreams, and Angela and Seth’s was to stop making turkey loaf.
By the time they sought help from the SPACE program’s Yaara Shimshoni last year, they had served it to their then-6-year-old son, Owen, some 3,000 times. (I have changed parents’ and children’s names.) Put another way, virtually every day for four years—two-thirds of his life—Owen had eaten turkey loaf for both lunch and dinner. For breakfast, he favored dry Cheerios.
Calling Owen a picky eater wouldn’t have captured the extent of the problem. He was terrified of most foods. On those rare occasions when he tasted something new, he would gag. Going out together as a family was a minor ordeal: Either they packed turkey loaf to take with them, or they hurried home before the next meal. Mostly, the family just stayed in. “If we ran out of it, Owen would have an absolute fit,” Seth said when he and Angela spoke with me in February. Once, after a supermarket strike disrupted the local turkey supply, he spent the night driving from store to store, searching for enough meat to get through the week...
Maybe the way to think about recent parenting is this: All kids today are being overprotected the way only girls used to be. Except the changes in childhood are far broader than that. Even girls, after all, used to get themselves around the neighborhood and have summer jobs and chores. Today, only 10 percent of kids walk or bicycle to school, a steep decline from decades past. Forty years ago, 58 percent of teenagers got summer jobs; today, 35 percent do, and the after-school job is an even rarer species. When Braun Research surveyed more than 1,000 American adults, 82 percent said that as children they’d had regular chores—but only 28 percent said their own children did.
