Overparenting creates a lot of tension. Our anxiousness about our children makes them, in turn, anxious. Little ones “graze” on our emotions. They feed on the tone we set, the emotional climate we create. They pick up on the ways in which we are nervous and hypervigilant about their safety, and it makes them nervous; so these feelings cycle. Parental anxiety can also slide children along the spectrum. American journalist Ellen Goodman said something that I find both moving and elemental. I carry a tattered copy of it in my wallet: “The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our
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