Headspace Conversations - Parenting and Anxiety

Hi, I am Julie and I'm here to talk about parenting and anxiety. I've lived with anxiety, I would say, all of my life, and I am a parent of two children. One is 27, 1 child is 22, and I've kind of been through the whole parenting experience. When you're a parent, there's no manual to tell you what to do. I hope I can share some of the experiences I've had with anxiety and with parenting that will help other people with their journey. Alright. All right, guys, as we continue on. Julie, you want to? Sure. So I am here today to talk about, well, anxiety and also parenting and how those two have connected in my life. As long as I can remember, I was an anxious kid. Unfortunately, I had a father who he was verbally abusive and physically abusive. Not in a sexual way, but hitting things like that. I remember at a very young age not wanting to eat, which was a frequent situation in my life. So my dad got mad and he dumped the cereal bowl with the milk over my head. I was under three, and I still remember this. So that's the kind of father I had, and I wasn't the kind of person he wanted me to be. Number one, I was born a girl. I think he wanted a boy. So that started out not well. As I got older, the anxiety grew with me. Fast forward a bunch of years, here I am, I have two kids, and when I did end up having children, I was worried. I just was adamant that I wasn't going to do any of the things that had been done to me by my dad. So I had my daughter and difficult pregnancy, which brought out a lot of my anxiety as well. She was born with a small head, it is called microcephaly, and we were told that there would be all kinds of things wrong with her, and every parent wants the best for their child. They want their child to be healthy and happy and hopefully fairly intelligent. And we were very, very worried. She was an anxious child right away. And then of course, I blamed myself because I was anxious while I was pregnant. I was anxious when I heard these things that might be wrong with her, so I did the best I could to give her lots of love. I never felt like I was loved by my father, so I wanted to make sure that my daughter felt loved. A lot of this has to do with her journey and that she did have anxiety, she had learning disabilities. It was very stressful. I wasn't happy that my daughter at age, I think she was 13 or 14, went on and at presence, but I also didn't want to see her being so uncomfortable and so unhappy that she didn't want to...