Parents Feel Separation Anxiety

Posted by Melissa Chapman Sep 6, 2006

After writing a three part series on how stay-at-home parents and parents in general can help their kids overcome the challenges and obstacles they face as they enter first, sixth and ninth grades, I feel like I need to go even deeper.

I'd like to explore the fact that I, a stay-at-home Mom of a five year old who is beginning Kindergarten this year, as ashamed as I am to admit this, I am really going to miss her during the day.

Is that crazy? Does that make me too overprotective of a parent? Does that mean that I don't have enough going on in my own life, and that I am focusing too much on my daughter, and that all this attention will actually be detrimental to her?

I'm just playing devil's advocate putting all these "Questions" out there.

I guess what I'm really trying to get at is the fact that, at least in my case, I have spent the better part of my daughter's life trying to protect her and anticipate anything that might be unsafe, or unsavory to her and I think I've been pretty successful at keeping her happy-go-lucky, without her knowledge that I am always behind the scenes monitoring things.

Yet now, I feel like when I send her to school in the morning, a place that she will stay from 9am to 3:30 pm; well, that's a really large chunk of time during which I don't really know exactly what is going over the course of her day, but more importantly how the events which she's experiencing, are affecting her and how she is, really, emotionally processing all these feelings, and thoughts, (try asking a five -year-old pointed questions, and you'll see it 's not that easy to get answers; it's almost as difficult as being a dentist who has to pull out a five-year-old's decaying tooth, almost impossible without the aid of major anesthetic and the promise of a shopping spree at the nearest toy store!!!!)

I have so many questions...Is she getting along with the other kids? Are her teachers treating her fairly? Did someone tease her? Did she eat all of her lunch? Did she go to the bathroom when she needed to? Does she feel like she belongs?.....

When I read back what I have written I sound like some maniacal -micromanaging, and controlling MOM, who if I keep up this level of intense scrutiny and hovering in my daughter's life, by the time she's ten-years-old, she'll probably want to run as far away from me as possible.

So how can I deal with this separation anxiety that I'm feeling right now? How can I get the answers to all these questions that I have without grilling her to death when she gets home from school? How will I really know if she TRULY feels good about herself and feels happy and content?

Stay tuned for my next article....aptly titled, "How parents can deal with their separation anxiety when their children go off to school full-time....

It's supposed to be that only the children feel this type of separation anxiety when they have to leave their parents, but I really think that a lot of parents feel the separation anxiety themselves.

Maybe stay-at home parents are a little more prone to feeling this way, being that we've spent the past four years taking care, playing with, reading to, going on play dates and Mommy and me classes with our kids. And now for the first time in their lives, our kids are going to be going somewhere on their own, a place where we can't go with them, and observe them, help them socialize and learn the basics of education.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm having a bit of a hard time dealing with this.....more to come.....