A friend of mine recently asked me, completely sincerely, whether I thought her son was showing early signs of anxiety because he didn’t like raising his hand in class.
He’s seven. There is nothing different or wrong about him. He’s just a regular, quiet seven-year-old.
But she’d been reading, and now there was a worry, and the worry had a kind of full-time quality to it that I recognized in a lot of my friends.
Now, I love my friends. I think they’re amazing parents, more thoughtful than mine ever tried to be. But somewhere in the last decade or two, the job of parent has changed shape in a big way. It stopped being something you do and became something you are — a whole identity, monitored and graded and never quite finished.
And I keep having this thought I can’t say at the group dinners, where everyone’s comparing notes on screens and snacks and whether to hold the kid back a year. My parents treated raising me like maybe the third most important thing in their lives. Behind their marriage. Behind their work. Roughly tied with the garden.
And I think it’s the reason I turned out steady. I think it’s why I can sit alone in a room and not need anyone to tell me how I’m doing in it.
They loved me. They just didn’t orbit me.
“Third most important thing” sounds like a complaint, and it isn’t. My parents were great. They showed up for the big stuff. But they had whole lives churning underneath mine — friends, jobs, a marriage with its own private weather — and they never once acted like I was the center of the household.
Dinner was at six. Not “six unless you’re not hungry.” Not a separate plate for the picky kid. Six.
Friday nights belonged to them, and I got a sitter who let me watch things I was far too young to watch. When I was bored, that was my problem. Nobody scheduled anything to solve it. Boredom was just what Sundays felt like.
You never notice it while it’s happening. But being handed a little benign neglect meant I had to do something with myself, and doing something with myself, over and over in small unimpressive ways, is how I slowly came to believe I could handle being a person. I’m not sure there’s another route to that belief. I think you mostly have to be left alone enough to find it.
The hovering doesn’t even work, which is what gets me
You’d assume more attention makes a more secure kid — more eyes on them, more support, more love made visible. It mostly does the opposite.
A psychologist at the University of Mary Washington ran a study that people keep coming back to. She looked at college students whose parents were still managing the small print of their lives, and those students weren’t flourishing — they reported more depression and less satisfaction with their lives, and what sat underneath it was a missing sense of autonomy.
If nobody ever lets you steer, you don’t end up feeling safe. You end up feeling like you can’t drive.
I felt a little smug reading that, and then bad about the smugness, because my friends aren’t running experiments, they’re just tired people who love their kids and got handed a culture that told them love means vigilance. But the finding is stubborn, and it shows up again and again.
Being attended to that completely can leave a kid feeling weirdly unconnected — handled rather than known. Which is the cruel little twist of the whole thing, because it was love the entire time. It just got delivered as management.
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The kid catches the parent’s anxiety
Kids are antennae. They pick up the signal whether or not you mean to send it.
Developmental research has shown how the pressure to stay endlessly switched-on produces real, measurable stress, and how, strangely, anxious parents tend to become more withdrawn and less responsive in exactly the moments they’re working hardest to be present.
So the harder you grip, the less available you sometimes are.
My mother, by contrast, was out in the yard most Saturdays, half-listening to whatever catastrophe I was narrating, pulling weeds. I hated it sometimes. I wanted the full beam of her attention, and I didn’t always get it.
But she was modeling something I had no words for then: that a person can love you and still be calm. That your small disaster is not the building on fire. Kids who grow up around that calm tend to borrow it. Kids who grow up around a hum of low-grade parental dread tend to borrow that instead.
What kids need isn’t more, it’s warmth with room in it
I’m not arguing for neglect, to be clear — distance has its own costs, and I’d be lying if I called my parents’ style a deliberate philosophy rather than, partly, the fashion of their decade.
But what I got, almost by accident, was warmth with space left inside it. They were around without being fused to me. They cared without supervising.
And I’ve come to think the space was the active ingredient. Not the warmth alone, which everybody’s got in surplus right now, but the daylight around it — the boredom nobody rushed to cure, the small problems nobody swooped in on, the afternoons where the adult in charge was busy with her own life and I had to become the adult in charge of mine.
That gap is where I learned the thing I most want for my friends’ kids: that I could be left alone and the world would hold.
You can’t hand a child that lesson directly. You can only step back far enough that they get to discover it themselves.
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I think we confused attention with love
Somewhere in my generation’s very decent wish to do better than our parents, I think a wire crossed.
We decided that more attention equals more love, so maximum attention must equal maximum love. But they’re not the same currency. You can flood a kid with the first and accidentally shortchange them on the trust that the second actually runs on.
My parents trusted me to be fine. It was occasionally maddening — there were absolutely nights I wished they’d noticed more, pushed more, hovered even a little. But the slow accumulated effect of being trusted is that you start, almost against your will, to suspect you might be trustworthy. You build a self that keeps running when the parent leaves the room.
I don’t say any of this at the dinners.
What I want to tell my friends is that the love was never in doubt, and the vigilance was never the proof of it. That they’re allowed to have a life their kid revolves around, instead of the other way around. That the kid is going to be fine — better than fine — and that one of the most generous things they could do is close the laptop, go to bed, and let him be a little more on his own than feels comfortable.
Not because they love him too much. Because the kind of love that loosens its grip might be the exact kind he needs.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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