My Kids Weren’t Anxious. I Was.

I thought I was protecting them, blind to what was really happening

4 min read

1 hour ago

My 6-year-old son rustled noisily in his blankets.

“What if a bad man comes?” he asked.

“No one will come,” I assured him from the other side of the bed.

“But what if he does?” he said quietly as he hid himself under the covers.

I took a deep breath.

He hadn’t seen anything or heard anything recently that could explain this.

But somehow, he was deathly afraid of a “bad man” coming while he was sleeping. And it was keeping him up at night.

Eventually my son fell asleep, and I brushed it off as merely a kid being a kid with irrational fears.

But in reality? I had no idea how deep it actually went.

I grew up in a fairly safe environment.

Safe, in all senses of the word, both physically and emotionally.

My parents tended to be very cautious. Both of them came from immigrant families who didn’t have much.

Naturally, having a “comfortable” life in America wasn’t something their families wanted to take for granted. And they didn’t want…