Fears of the father and fears of the son

It's a Dad's Life: For much of my life I experienced a constant low level of anxiety. It was never debilitating but it characterised me and much of the way I behaved. In recent years, an awareness of how anxiety affects me and a desire to move out of its control has left it more or less redundant, writes Adam Brophy.

But you don't leave something down that you've carried for a long time and immediately forget about it. Certain situations can still stress me disproportionately but I recognise that my reactions are really highlighting another, probably unconscious, concern rather than the one apparently causing the worry.

If this sounds like psychobabble, it is. I have trained as a psychotherapist and, while I write this column purely from a layman's perspective, that training obviously comes into my relationships, with my kids in particular, bidden or not. And that struck me recently while talking to a friend about our children's anxieties.

One of his sons is four and still occasionally wets the bed. All the parenting books will tell you that this is perfectly normal due to any number of reasons, but often because bladder control hasn't fully developed yet. My elder was exactly the same and she turned off like a tap with a new washer a couple of months before she turned five.

I expressed all that to my buddy but suggested that he should keep an eye on it because his son may be anxious about something that he's unable to express. He hated the idea of that: "What's he got to be anxious about? When he's gonna get fed next? Whether he's gonna wear his blue jeans or his other jeans to creche tomorrow?"

So, we had a giggle about it. But then afterwards, my therapy head kept impinging on me, wondering if my friend's own anxieties are so deeply buried that he has no awareness of them and therefore cannot allow his child to express his insecurities.

Then my real head caught my therapy head with a flurry of punches that ended in a knockout uppercut that stated, "Maybe, he's not anxious at all, stop inflicting your own experience on others."

My worries for my kids are often based on my own struggles, but they can't be replicated onto other parents' situations. Being a child is, with any luck and justice, a joyous existence, free from responsibility, with a brand new toy of a world to discover.

But it is a precarious one. We are aware from a very young age that we would be unable to manage on our own and that every time our parents move away from us, we need them to come back. That constant separation and reunion that goes on in a child's life can be fraught with anxiety, but it is a necessary part of their development and of becoming independent.

Football manager Bill Shankly once said, "Football is a simple game complicated by fools." He could have been talking about parenting. In our relationships with our kids, all we really have to offer them is ourselves. Yet that simple thing is a huge ask. We've all gone through childhood, but when we become parents it's as if we forget everything that happened to us back then and set about making a wheel with a T-square.

If I pick up on one of my girls being anxious, I do my best to help them through whatever is bothering them. My difficulty is sometimes in acknowledging that it is their emotion and not mine they are experiencing.

I have no such problem with their joy, sadness or hurt, but anxiety seems to belong to me. Sometimes, no, all the time, you have to let them get on with it and just try to be a half-decent Dad.