Why you should stop telling worried parents to stop worrying

It sounds like helpful advice but it really does nothing to help. Photo / 123rf

COMMENT:

My daughter has recently started eating again.

(Pause so I can go knock on all wood and pray to all gods I haven't just jinxed it.)

This doesn't sound too groundbreaking until you consider that she's 2 and hasn't really eaten for the past year or so. She'd pick on bits of food but refuse it all and survive almost entirely on milk bottles. For a while, on a good day, she'd take two mouthfuls of food (likely a couple of bits of pasta but nothing else).

I lost countless hours of sleep and gained some new wrinkles worrying about it. Whatever tip or trick the internet suggested, I tried. We saw the doctor multiple times but, because she was still growing and putting weight on (albeit slowly), the doctor always sent me home telling me not to worry.

Much to no one's surprise, that didn't work. The saying is true: no one has ever calmed down by being told to calm down.

Instead of doing what the doctor said and not worry, I'd go home and research some more, try a few more ways to trick her into accidentally letting food into her mouth, chewing it and letting it go all the way to her stomach. Day after day I failed, but I never stopped worrying and, because of that, I never stopped trying.

The doctors kept saying she'd be okay, that she'd outgrow it, that it was "just a phase" (bloody long phase, half her life), that no child has ever starved themselves by choice (which my internet searches then showed me is actually not true).

Meanwhile "not worrying" wouldn't get food into my daughter's stomach so, to me, that wasn't an option worth trying. The "she'll be right" attitude is all well and good when the check engine light comes on but it really has no place in my attitude towards my child's health and wellbeing.

At one stage, I noticed she accepted a little yoghurt pouch if she could eat it while sitting in the supermarket trolley as we went around the supermarket. For a while, that was the only food she'd accept in a day. So I spent days going to the supermarket just for that yoghurt, which I knew she'd eat, then paying for an empty pouch at the checkout. I kept food diaries of the things she'd accept, I tried every shape of plate you can think of, I tried letting her watch screens while she ate (bad mama, I know), I made up songs about her food (and the worst part of that is admitting to that online right now).

I tried it all and nothing worked. But I still don't regret trying, I couldn't not. The only times I ever got really upset was when doctors told me not to worry, when they dismissed my concerns.

Were they right that I didn't have to worry because she'd come right? Apparently so. Does that mean saying that helped me? Not at all. Should I stop asking questions and then answering them straight away? One hundred per cent.

Don't ever tell a worried parent not to worry. They won't stop worrying because you said that, their worry will just weigh them down even more, as they're made to feel like it's not legitimate.

My daughter eats these days (sorry, let me go knock on wood again) but I wouldn't take back all my failed attempts at fixing the issue. All those hours of worrying, all the tears (mine more than hers), the feeling of helplessness and the worry over how I was somehow failing her… those are part of what makes me a mother. Worrying and stressing over it felt like natural responses to my instincts.

The only times I look back with sadness were the times someone told me not to worry about it and I spent the hours after that feeling even worse about how my concerns were not legitimate.

If your child is unwell, worry. Try everything to fix it, even the stuff that definitely won't work. Try it all and worry even though your child will be ok. Deep down, you know it's going to be okay but not worrying is contradicting your nature as a parent.

We're not fully out of the woods yet but we've made some great strides in the past few weeks, which is how I'm currently able to write about this without having a mild anxiety attack.

In the end, here's what did work for me: opening my mind about all the different things that could help (an osteopath ended up working wonders, even if I was sceptical at first), changing GPs to a doctor who doesn't tell me not to worry and actually suggested new solutions as well as a plan to follow up on them and change them if they weren't working, and hearing from people who lived with the same worries (I joined a Facebook group for parents of extreme selective eaters and reading their worries helped soothe mine, and it saved my sanity knowing I wasn't the only parent on the planet with a child who refused all food for days on end).

What definitely did not work for me was being told to stop worrying. The number of times that advice made me feel better, one year on, remains at precisely zero.

I am glad I worried, I am glad I lost so much sleep over it, I am glad about all the times I felt so goddamn awful about how things were going. Today, as parents, we're so relieved she eats we send each other photos of her eating, because they feel like such a treat. We also know, as her parents, whether we had to or not, we tried absolutely everything we could.

And that's all you can ever do.