Your child is anxious… and suddenly you are too.

When we love an anxious child, their worry doesn’t stay neatly in their body - it moves straight into ours. We start scanning, planning, catastrophising, lying awake at night listening to their breathing and imagining everything that might go wrong. And before we know it, their anxiety is running our nervous system too.

In this Parent Pause I talk about the night I realised I’d caught my child’s anxiety. How quietly terrifying that felt. And also how important it was. Because if we don’t notice that what we’re feeling is ours, we start trying to fix our children so that we can feel better. And that’s a heavy, unfair burden for them to carry.

This audio is about learning to gently separate what belongs to us from what belongs to them. About finding our own feet again so we can offer something steadier to lean on. Not perfect calm. Just a grounded, human parent who keeps coming back to themselves.

Because when we look after our own nervous system, our children get to borrow it. And that changes everything.

Thank you for pausing with me. Take care.

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