Oh she will be fine

“Oh She will be fine”  Edward H. Plimpton, PhD

Recently, you expressed a concern about your anxious child to a friend, or perhaps a pediatrician or teacher, and were told “Oh, she will be fine, it is probably just a phase”. Perhaps. A lot of parenting involves learning what to fuss over and what to let go.  Mark Twain once said “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened”.  A wise statement, implicit in the well-intentioned reassurances from friends and professionals. It is invaluable to draw upon the experience of others who know how certain behaviors and feelings can change and unfold over time. It is not unusual for a child to tearfully and bitterly protest about being dropped off at daycare or school, and then to have the teacher report that she was fully and happily engaged ten minutes later. Experience can teach us not to be too reactive to the present moment, especially since excessive parental reactions foster anxiety and other problems in children.  And children can be incredibly resilient under difficult circumstances in seeking out what they need to prosper and thrive. So there is a lot of truth to the simple statement that “she will be fine”.

“She will be fine”, however, can also be an empty and misleading reassurance. Many a parent has sensed that something was not quite right, only to be dismissed with “it is just a phase,” with the underlying message that it is simply the concern of a nervous parent. But life is uncertain, there is no crystal ball, and parenting is definitely an exercise in tolerating uncertainty. Sometimes “she will be fine” is the response of someone who doesn’t have the knowledge to say anything else, or who doesn’t want to share the uncertainty and doubt. It is, after all, quite difficult to tolerate being in a state of uncertainty. But there is good reason not to dismiss your concerns about your child, whom you know better than anyone else. It may seem obvious, but the reason you know your child so well is that you have a sense of her behavior over time, and her daily rhythms, and the way that she is unique. Any one snapshot of your child, say in school or in the doctor’s office, is only a partial view. ADHD, for instance, is not properly diagnosed by just observing a child in a doctor’s office, but rather by looking at her in several different settings.  Anxious children are well known to keep a low profile in school and in other settings outside of the home.  They can keep it together in school, only to fall apart when they are safe with a parent. The disparity in terms of how your child is viewed does not mean that either you or the friendly commentator is incorrect–you just have access to different time samples. And having a sense of a child across time puts a parent in a privileged position.  So your knowledge of your child’s behavior over time is an invaluable piece of information which should not be discounted.

When faced with a strong intuition that something is not right, one thing a parent can do is to keep asking questions and  sharing experience. This may help clarify the nature of your concern and help sort out what is just a phase and what is a roadblock to your child’s development. Parenting can be complicated, and there is a lot of sorting out to be done, which is why we talk about our kids so much. As the famous pediatrician Benjamin Spock said many years ago, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

copyright@Edward H. Plimpton, PhD