Why I Have Anxiety About My Child’s Future (And What Actually Helps)
It’s 10:20 on a Tuesday night. The dishwasher just finished its cycle, my coffee has gone cold on the coffee table, and I’m matching mismatched athletic socks after my 14-year-old’s soccer practice. I pick up his math notebook, which splayed open on the couch cushion, half a chewy granola bar tucked under a sheet of graph paper, and a crumpled course registration form peeks out from the back cover. I tuck the granola wrapper in the trash and smooth the form out, and that’s when it hits me: that tight, heavy feeling in my chest that I’ve come to know as future anxiety.
My son is dyslexic. We spent three years fighting our elementary school to get him the reading accommodations he needed. He went from hiding his book during independent reading to getting Bs in honors classes now, and he still has to work twice as hard as the kid next to him to get the same grade. I see him retype the same paragraph three times because he mixed up the order of the words. I see him crumple his quiz up and throw it in his backpack when he gets a C he studied a week for. And all I can think when I look at that course registration form marked with AP bio and AP stats is: what comes next? Will colleges see how hard he works, or will they just see the slightly lower test scores? Will he be able to get a job that doesn’t penalize him for mixing up meeting times or misreading a spreadsheet? Will he ever be able to afford to live on his own, or will he be stuck stressed and broke forever?
Last Saturday, we stopped at the grocery store after his game to get milk and ice cream. An older woman in front of us dropped a whole case of canned peaches right by the checkout, glass jars clinking all over the floor. My son didn’t even hesitate. He dropped his half-eaten popsicle in the nearest trash can, knelt down, picked every single one up, helped her carry them out to her car, and even lifted the heavy case into her trunk for her. She thanked him and said he was such a nice young man, and he just shrugged and said “no problem” before wandering back to get a new popsicle. I stood there waiting, and I thought: that’s the kind of person I want him to be. But that night, I still laid awake worrying about his upcoming ACT prep.
I talked to his guidance counselor about it a couple weeks ago, and I expected her to tell me he’s doing great, don’t worry. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and said she worries about her own 16-year-old’s future too, and most of the parents she talks to are carrying the same quiet weight. Then she said something that stuck with me: most of us are worrying about a future that doesn’t even exist anymore. The path we grew up with – graduate high school at 18, go to four-year college, get a job, stay there 30 years, retire – that’s not the path most kids take now. So why are we all panicking if our kid doesn’t fit that mold by 14?
I started trying small, low-effort things after that conversation, nothing big or life-changing. First, when I feel that tight feeling in my chest, I pull out my notes app and write down one thing my son did in the last week that has nothing to do with grades, sports, or future resume lines. Last week it was “remembered to feed the neighbor’s cat every day while they were on vacation, even when he had two games and a project due”. The week before that it was “stayed home to play board games with his little cousin when all his friends were going to the movies because she was upset her parents went out of town”. It takes 30 seconds, and it yanks me out of the spiral of what could go wrong back to what’s actually right in front of me.
Second, I swapped my standard question. I used to ask him every Sunday at dinner “what do you want to do after high school?” and it would shut the whole conversation down. He’d shrug and say “I don’t know” and go back to his phone, and I’d leave the table more anxious than I was before. Now I ask “what’s one thing you did this week that was fun, that didn’t feel like homework or practice?” Last week he told me he liked fixing the broken chain on his friend’s bike after school. The week before that he talked about editing the soccer team’s highlight reel for the end of the season. It doesn’t get him into college, but it tells me what he likes doing, what he’s good at that doesn’t show up on a report card. And it doesn’t make either of us stressed.
Third, I unfollowed four parenting accounts on Instagram that were all about college admissions and getting ahead. I used to scroll them while I waited for his practice to end, and every post left me convinced I was messing him up by not signing him up for more summer programs or forcing him to study more. Now I follow a bunch of home repair accounts and a guy who bakes sourdough in his backyard, and scrolling doesn’t make me anxious anymore. That’s a two-minute change that made a bigger difference than any expensive therapy workbook I bought last year.
I still get anxious. Last night, after I folded that laundry, I stayed up for 25 minutes looking up trade school programs for mechanics and community college dyslexia support, just in case. I still catch myself holding my breath when he brings home a report card. I don’t think this anxiety goes away completely, not for me anyway. The future is uncertain, no matter how much we plan for it. But lately, when I start spiraling, I pull up that list in my notes app, and I read that line about the canned peaches. My son can’t spell “necessary” on the first try, but he stops to help a stranger carry her groceries. That’s not nothing. That’s the stuff that will get him through whatever future he ends up having, even if it’s not the one I pictured for him when he was 8. And that’s enough for right now.
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