I’d like your advice navigating my children’s social lives along with my anxiety. My children are 10 and eight.
I did not have an easy ride with friendships as a young person. Like my eldest I am introverted and found socialising at school difficult. I was also bullied, which destroyed my self-confidence.
As a mum, I want to support my children to make secure and supportive relationships. I want to be someone they can talk to about their social issues, but every time something comes up I can feel my previous experiences bubbling to the surface. I try to advise them as best I can, but I worry that my advice is skewed by my experiences.
This feels particularly challenging when my children would like to invite friends around to play. First I have to approach their parents to arrange playdates and this fills me with anxiety. I worry they will not respond, or that they will only accept out of politeness. When we have successfully made arrangements in the past I have spent days panicking about it – worrying that the friend will have a bad time at our house and will not want to be friends with my child afterward.
I have tried talking to my husband about this. He feels that I am overreacting and I probably am. But my emotions feel as though they are on a constant rollercoaster linked to my children’s friendships and this does not feel healthy for any of us.
I just want to be able to unlink my children’s social lives from my own experiences and be the best mum I can.
You told me a lot about your children but I have edited this out as I wanted to concentrate on you. I think your children are fine. But you are very astute to realise that your issues are muscling in on your interactions with them. There are so many issues from our childhood which, if left unresolved, can resurface when we have our own children. I see it over and over again. I saw it in myself when I too became a mother.
“It’s very impressive,” said psychoanalyst and psychologist Prof Alessandra Lemma, “that you know this is about you and you don’t want to burden your children with whatever unresolved issues you are carrying. That to me is an indication of what a good parent you are trying to be.”
Lemma wondered if you had had a parent who was able to think about you in this way? “For a letter which is all about parenting, the absence of any reference to your own parents is very striking.”
I suspect, but cannot be sure, that you were not so tenderly thought of as a child and now you want to do everything you can to avoid your own children feeling like you did. So every time your children go through [what you perceive to be] a difficult patch your own hurt is dredged up and you go into a sort of panic that the same thing is happening to them.
But, as Lemma observed, you worry that “your children are as deprived as you feel, but in fact they do confide in you. The more you can normalise some of the strains of childhood friendships and the rivalries that happen, the more you can free yourself from the pain of your experience, the more you can help your children face similar problems.”
As for worrying about playdates, you will not be the only parent – I promise – worried about being judged or not responded to.
“What might be going on for you,” said Lemma, “in that gap when you don’t get [say] a reply, is that you fill it with the certainty of your anxieties (eg “they don’t like me”) to manage the uncertainty. It’s a way of protecting yourself, but it’s costly to you as it confirms your worst fears rather than challenging them.”
Bullying can have lifelong effects, but these can be challenged and lessened. I think you’ve started an important process and I wonder if I can persuade you to seek out some therapy to help you turn your feelings over with someone?
Your advice is informed by your experiences, this is true of all of us – it’s valuable wisdom. It will only be skewed if you think your children are on exactly the same path as you. They are not. You are doing really well and your children are very lucky to have such a thoughtful mother. I have every faith you can do this.
• Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
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