I have anxiety, insane anxiety. Not because I don’t trust my kids, but because I’m terrified of something bad happening to them.
I trust them completely, it’s the world I don’t trust.
It’s that fear that sometimes makes me reach for Life360 and check. It’s being on a bunch of our city’s Facebook pages and I see a post about a car accident or hearing sirens at night, watching one too many true life docuseries, and just wanting to know they’re okay.
Tools like Life360 and Ring Camera are sold as ways to keep our kids “safe.” And sometimes they do. But other times? They just give our anxious brains one more feed to refresh. I am not trying to control my kids, I’m trying to calm myself.
In today’s age, we’re parenting while carrying this invisible weight of fear, the fear that the one time we look away, something will happen. That we’ll miss the moment we could have prevented. That fear, it’s exhausting, it’s constant, and it’s very real.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation explains it perfectly. We’ve replaced real-world risk with screen-based “safety.” We won’t let our kids walk to the park alone, but we give them a phone that connects them to strangers, addictive content, and 24/7 social feedback loops. We’ve limited their physical freedom, but handed them digital exposure without realizing the emotional toll, and in the process, we’ve created kids who feel less confident in the real world and parents who feel even more anxious behind the screen.
Recently I was on Instagram and there was a post with a poll about would you let your teenage kids go off by themselves while on vacation. I read all the comments and most of them were saying “No way,” “Are you nuts kids get abducted all the time.” And more like these. I was kind of surprised because, me with insane clinically diagnosed anxiety, I do let me kids do things by themselves on vacation. They both bring friends so they are not alone they have a friend, but they will go to the pool, go on walks, play tennis, pickle ball, go get coffee, etc. But trust me I do get it. I just also believe we need to trust our kids. Maybe because I actually have had anxiety since I was a teenager I work really hard on not letting my anxiety affect my kids.
But also here is the thing, we want our kids to grow up safe, to make it to adulthood without trauma, to avoid the mistakes we made, or at least the ones that could have destroyed us. We’re not parenting from a place of mistrust. We’re parenting from a place of love and fear that love isn’t enough to protect them.
No amount of tracking can protect us from the vulnerability of loving someone so much.
We can’t Ring doorbell our way out of fear, we can’t GPS-track our way to peace. We can only do what generations of parents before us have done. Teach, guide, trust, and pray they’ll make it home safe, not because we watched every move… but because we raised them with tools, love, and presence.
Nikki Lanigan
Nikki Lanigan is a yoga, HIIT, and Barre instructor, she is also a Holistic Health Coach through Institute of Integrative Nutrition. Nikki is trained in Yoga Shred, Yoga Psychology, meditation, chakra balancing, and EFT/Tapping. She has done trainings with Sadie Nardini and Ashley Turner. She got her 200 hour yoga teacher training in 2017 at the Carrie Treister School Of Yoga. Nikki takes a holistic view of health, helping her students and clients reach a place of self-love not just through movement, but with mindset and lifestyle guidance as well. Nikki is also show prep writer for The McVay Media Show Prep and host of the podcast Fit, Fun, and Frazzled. Connect with Nikki on Instagram. www.instagram.com/nikkilanigan.yogaandwellness www.instagram.com/fitfunandfrazzledpodcast
