How parents can cope with their *own* separation anxiety

1. Address your fears

In my role at Hand in Hand Parenting, we teach parents of young children the importance of having a ”long goodbye.” Rather than rushing off and leaving a child with another caregiver, or at daycare, we approach things differently. We recommend that parents stay with their children, as long as they are upset so they can work through their fears and express them while you listen and stay close.

Adults also need this kind of support to work through feelings, not with the child themselves, but with another adult. This could be a partner, friend or trained counselor or listener.

What are you most afraid of? The first step to letting go of fear is to shine a light on them, to become aware of what your fears are telling you.

Write them down, or talk to an understanding friend. No matter how silly or irrational they may be, giving space to talk them through can help you to let them go.

2. Create a listening partnership

A “listening partnership” scheme is where parents learn how to listen to each other, and this is a powerful way to let go of worries and fears so they don’t cloud your thinking.

Listening partnerships are an exchange that goes much deeper than everyday conversation. They allow you space to fully explore your feelings without being interrupted or given advice. This powerful practice allows you to follow where your mind takes you, and often your mind has a way of figuring things out and solving problems when you have the emotional support of another person to help guide you along the way.

You might find yourself having a good laugh or cry, and this physical release of feelings is key to lightening your emotional load and seeing things more clearly.

3. Focus on being present + address past experiences

One mother I spoke to found it hard to separate from her daughter because she’d had three miscarriages before her birth and was always anxious that something might happen to her. Another mother had a parent who worked overseas when she was young and the loss she had felt made her extremely conscious to emphasize connection with her own son.

Of course, we want to do the best for our children and learn by what didn’t work so well for us when we were young. However, many of us find ourselves overcompensating for hurts we experienced in our own childhood.

Our parenting becomes an unconscious attempt to fill the own gaps, and holes in our own past experiences. We project our past pain onto the present and may lose perspective on what’s really going on.

Healing our past hurts is vital to see the present for what it really is, and make decisions on when to separate from our child that make sense for what’s really going on in the here and now.

If you find yourself feeling overly anxious about separating from your child it’s worth asking yourself where did these feelings come from? Are they related to childhood experiences of not having enough close connection? Or are they related to early experience in your child’s life, that have left you with anxiety?

Our anxiety can be affected by things that happened many years ago or something that happened just the other week. Giving these feelings attention, with the support of a listener or therapist can help you let go of them.

I did go and take the writing course, and I found that somehow my daughter and I actually became more closely connected through the experience. My daughter was taken care of by our village while I was away, and I got to follow my dreams.

Perhaps it was that we both spread our wings and faced our anxiety about the separation that allowed us to find a deeper sense of connection that lay beyond our fears.