Back-to-School Anxiety? David & Meg Robbins

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Meg: When I look back at things that they’ve weathered already, as much as I hate when they experience pain and I want to fix it for them, I know that is the thing that shapes them. God uses the hard, painful things to show them who He is, to show them who they are, and who He made them to be, if they will look for that.

Shelby: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Shelby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com.

Dave: This is FamilyLife Today!

We have David and Meg Robbins back in the studio. Welcome back, guys.

David: It’s good to be back.

Ann: We love having you. This is going to be a great topic today because we’re talking about school starting.

David: We’re back for a back-to-school [program]. We need to talk about the parent side of this, right?

Ann: —the anxiety and stress that parents feel. Now you’re back to packing lunches possibly, and now you’re hearing all the drama that’s going on.

Meg: That’s true.

Ann: Now there’s all the homework happening.

David: You are laying it on, and you are right. [Laughter]

Meg: —and all the activities. I think we barely mentioned this yesterday but how much is going on [that] the kids can be a part of. In some ways, it’s great but in some ways, it’s hard to draw limits and lines and keep your own family time sacred and even present at all.

Yes, it’s a lot. There is a lot of anxiety that comes with the start of school for sure.

Dave: Take us into the Robbins home. Honestly, do you guys feel anxiety. You’ve got two—

Meg: One in elementary—

Dave: Okay.

Meg: —third grade. Then we have a ninth grader entering high school and an eleventh grader.

Dave: Talk about the stress.

David: I think the main thing, especially in this season is just all the orchestration to pull off getting then into school. In that first month, the layers of preparation and supplies and this time we’re adding the college mix into that.

Meg: I have to say that if you’re asking if we’re feeling anxiety, I can be super honest and say, certainly, because the other kids are walking a path that we have been before. We’ve had kids start high school. We’ve had kids go into third grade. Each one carries their own unique challenges, so you feel things around that for sure. But sending your kid off to college, this is a whole new thing for us. I’m feeling all of the feels.

David: It’s a lot the same and a lot different as sending your kid to kindergarten. Some of you are sending your kid to pre-K and kindergarten for the first time.

Ann: Yes.

David: The anxiety for me starts coming out in unhealthy ways when I just start functioning and getting it all done, because that’s what has to happen in some ways. Logistically I say, “Alright, let’s make it all happen.” I start ignoring myself and then that ends detaching Meg and me and that ends up with me just functioning with the kids and making sure it all happens.

Ann: You become very task oriented?

David: Even though I’m people [oriented] to the core, I become task [oriented] because it’s so much in this unique back-to-school season.

Meg: We want to end well. We want to get in all the things and do all the things but let him have the space and freedom to do that with his friends and people in his life. Yet, our kids have our own grief process of watching their brother leave.

Dave: Talk about that because I remember our oldest is C.J. and he’s married now, but when he was going into college—you just said a couple of things we did—one was his senior year we said, “You want to go out for burger tonight. You want to go out tomorrow night?” because we felt like “The window’s closing; we’ve got to grab every moment,” so we were trying to seize those moments.

But then when we got him to school, I’ll never forget driving away and looking in the rearview mirror and seeing him stand there. We were bawling our eyes out, overwhelmed by “Our oldest is leaving.” Again, it was everything we prepared for; this what we want to do.

David: This is what we want.

Meg: We are launching.

Dave: But the fear and anxiety in my soul was the Christian-walk part of “We poured into him; we prayed over him; we’ve cast a vision for him to be a man of God. Now he’s on a campus—” —this was a public, secular school where— “—I know what I did when I got there; it was not good. I took my freedom to bad places.” We were driving away thinking, “Will he make good choices?”

Talk about that kind of stress. Maybe you don’t have that, but we surely did.

Meg: For sure. I think sometimes there are seasons of parenting where you can have this illusion of control, especially when they’re younger. [Laughter] You don’t have any control but for some reason we feel like—you are making some decisions like “When is everybody going to bed?” and those kinds of things, or at least in theory.

But I think you hit this stage, this point in your oldest’s life where “No, we don’t have any control. We really never did.” But it’s this moment of deep, deep surrender and “Do I trust you, Lord, in whatever story You are writing in his life and the choices that he makes some of them, probably many of them, I will have no idea what exactly what is going on?” Even that reality coming to terms with “I’m not going to know what he’s doing most of the time.”

David: I think that same principle is the principle that applies no matter what age your child is. If you have a pre-Ker all the way to this release point that is a little more tangible, they’re all surrender, release points. Cissy Goff talked about anxiety. She said, “Anxiety is always an overestimation of the problem and an underestimation of ourselves,” or for kids, themselves. But let’s talk about parents here.

There are holy moments in back to school [season] where you can actively on the way and especially after drop off or as you send people out the door, whatever stage you are in, you get to surrender every day, your kids. You get to intercede for them every day. You get the opportunity to get honest about your own stuff that’s surfacing for you.

There’s nothing like the most intimate relationship in your life to sometimes—what was the quote we heard this weekend of “I feel like God gave us teenagers in order to know what it feels like to have something created in your image that rejects you.” [Laughter]

That affects us and that affects our identity. But we end up underestimating our identity in Christ. Seven words in Colossians that really can change the game every single day if we live them out: “Christ in us the hope of glory.” [Colossians 1:27, Paraphrased]

He didn’t just forgive our sins and take them away. He forgives us when we get wrapped around and sin in our anxiety, but He put into us His Holy Spirit, His righteousness, divine resources for us to live this day, today, differently, [so] that we can surrender today and say, “God, they are yours and I am coming out sideways. Help me, Lord, with the way my anxiety is coming out.”

Because the scariest thing about anxiety in a parent—I think it was Josh Straub who told us this from research—the number one predictor, not the only predictor, but the number one predictor of how your kids will deal with anxiety is how their parents deal with stress and anxiety—

Ann: Yes.

David: —which puts a mirror up close to my face.

Ann: Me, too, David. I remember dropping C.J. off, Dave, that first day. We dropped him off at this incredibly hard engineering school that he got into. He has ADD. So, I’m also thinking of parents that are sending their kids off. Maybe there’s some sort of learning challenge or a diagnosis that you are thinking, “Oh!” But I also remember as we were crying going home, we also prayed for him and did as we did many nights: “Lord, we lay this boy at the altar. You love him more that we do.”

I think that’s a great spot because I can’t take the anxiety of it. It wrecks me. As you said, it comes out all different places so to say, “Lord, we just surrender them.” As you said, David, whether they’re in kindergarten, whether they have the hardest learning challenge and you are thinking, “I don’t know how they will survive, and we’re worried about their self esteem and how they will manage.” Isn’t it reassuring to remember that we can drop them at the altar of God and He says, “I’ve got them.”

Meg: It’s remembering how trustworthy our God is and that He loves our kids more than we do.

Ann: Yes.

Meg: That surrender is He already has them but there is something about letting them go again into His hands.

David: Can I say though that these are words we say to ourselves, words we’ve heard, words that get talked around this table a lot. It’s another thing for me, as a dad, to stop and do it. It’s one thing to know it. It’s another thing to say, “In the bleachers today watching a game, a practice, I’m going to release that kid all practice. Lord, I’m going to go to practice with intentionality to pray over that kid the entire time. Lord, I release this about him to You; I surrender this,” and then begin to take a listening posture and say, “So, how do You want me to participate in how you’re shaping this kid?”

That’s what we get to do as parents. We do have a stewardship, and I know all those things, but again going back to how we started, I can just function, get to practice, talk to the parents, enjoy being on mission, talk to the kid about how the practice was. Sometimes, we have to live out release time, surrender time. That’s an action I can do this afternoon as I go to practice.

It’s one thing to say the words. We know these words, and we do them in principle. It’s another thing to do them today.

Ann: We prayed every day before school on the way to school. Honestly, I was praying for the kids, but I think it was more for me than anybody. [Laughter]

David: That’s so true.

Ann: I don’t even know if they were listening as I was driving them to school on certain days. But just that habit of praying for them, that it’s releasing them, because that first son who went to college, when he had a big exam coming up, you know what he would do? [He would say], “Hey, mom and Dad, I’ve got this huge exam. Would you guys pray for me?” Because that had become a pattern in our lives that when we’re up against something hard and difficult or easy, but especially when we’re really struggling, where do we go? We go to our Father who loves us.

Meg: That reminds me of one of my favorite verses, Isaiah 26:3 [which says], “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”

Praying with our kids before school or before a tryout for something or all these new things or daily, that teaches them what it means to have our minds fixed on the Lord and trusting in Him. That is where peace comes from.

Ann: Yes.

Dave: I want to know what your anxiety points are in your family because when I think back to when our kids were in school days, mine was money. I can remember nights, many nights, when they were in middle school and high school starting to think about “How do we pay for college?” I would lay there thinking, “Oh, my goodness, college is going up and up and up.”

I can say this looking back, that school that our oldest went to that we dropped him off at and cried, it was a coop, so it was an engineering school where you went to school three months [then] you went to a job, and they all had great jobs.

My next son went to Moody. They covered the tuition. I thought, “You’re the man!” Then our third son got a football scholarship. It was like all that anxiety, all those sleepless nights—

Ann: Let me add this, too, because this is miraculous, but then that oldest son ended up transferring. He wanted to finish at a different university. It was a great decision for him. But again, we thought, “Oh, how are we going to afford this? Now he’s living off campus.”

Dave: Yes, he wanted to live off campus. Again, I thought, “How much is that going to cost?” [Laughter] We went up there and we were walking around this apartment building. A lot of students lived there. The owners of the apartment building walked into this room to show us—

Ann: That’s right.

Dave: They looked at us and said, “Dave and Ann Wilson, what are you doing here?”

I said, “Our son, C.J., wants to rent this.

They said, “We’ve been going to your church for 20 years.”

I said, “What do you mean? This is three hours from our home.”

He said, “This is a rental property for us.” Next thing you know they call us and said, “We’re going to comp you son’s rent.”

Meg: No way!

David: The Lord will provide in different ways.

Meg: That’s amazing.

Dave: I thought, “God, You are so good!” Can you believe that. It was just for one year but what a gift.

Ann: Maybe you’re not going to get that kind of [provision] but—

Dave: —God’s got you. That’s all we’re trying to say to you as parents. I know the anxiety. It’s real. There’s a God that is walking right beside you.

Meg: A huge anxiety point for me is the pain that our kids feel. When they’re feeling something whether it’s tension with their friends or feeling left out or coaching. Maybe I don’t think the coach sees them for what they’re trying to contribute or whatever it is. I feel those things so deeply, and sometimes it’s worse than if it were happening to me.

Ann: Yes.

Meg: Probably more deeply than my kids sometimes. That’s where I probably experience the most anxiety as a parent. I think that in some ways, God made us that way. He made us as moms for sure, maybe as dads, too, I guess, to feel at some level what they’re feeling. It gives us empathy for them. It allows us to know how to pray for them and come alongside them. But I think that’s where I have to constantly come back to “Okay, Lord, help me remember that You are using this, and You are in this.”

When I look back at things that they weathered already, as much as I hate when they experience pain and I want to fix it for them, I know that is the thing that shapes them. God uses the hard, painful things to show them who He is, to show them who they are, and who He made them to be if they will look for that.

David: It develops resilience that they’re going to need.

Meg: For sure.

Dave: What’s yours, David?

David: Friendships were such a hard thing for me growing up. That is one area Meg kind of—

Dave: That I can hardly believe.

Ann: Me, either.

Dave: You are such a good friend.

David: Let’s just say I heard at one point, and I was grateful to hear it “You know, David, you don’t want to ever peak in middle school. It doesn’t work out good.” [Laughter]

I thought, “You know what? I’m taking that one forward.” I’m glad I didn’t peak in middle school. But I think one of the things that haunts me as they get a little older that does worry me [is] the parts I see ourselves in them and how our story is like we’re untangling our own stories of why we were the way we were and the things we tried to lunge after to have our identity in that weren’t Jesus.

I think, “Oh man, that kid, they’re so over involved, they’re just like me. I passed that one down.” “Oh, this kid, there’s fear around people. Oh man!” It can be easy to start seeing yourselves and your own wounds that you carried over. Sure, some of that probably is getting passed down but I’m not going to enter in perfectly but how do I enter into some of their pain?

Pain and fear are a real part of life and what we do with them ends up writing a lot of our stories and what ends up controlling us and our false beliefs of where we end up sinning and where we over function.

When I see those faint glimpses so clearly in my kids lives there is a lot of burden and anxiety that heaps on. I can start heaping on in shame thinking, “Lord, I haven’t processed for myself enough or what have I not processed with them. It’s so obvious I passed this on to them.” But I think, “Lord, help me; help me know the pace; help me know how to enter in.”

But that really ties me up.

Ann: Mine is the fear of what they’re being exposed to, not just the peer pressures, but also the cultural mindsets of the day: “Will they cave in; will they be able to stand; will they….”

Parents are facing that way more than what we faced. Every generation has its things that—but then I’d work myself into this [questioning], “What if they…?

Have you guys done that? “Well, what if they get in this relationship? What if they start partying?” “What if they…?”

David: Sure.

Ann: When I went to that place, for me, it didn’t do any good. Zero. That’s not something I struggled with when I was growing up. I think it’s because my parents created this atmosphere in our home that was fun. I thought “This party feels so boring compared to—I wonder what my family is doing?” Because they created this great atmosphere of joy, love and really just fun.

I think we forget how our homes can lure them back.

David: That’s good.

Dave: Make it a haven.

Ann: Yes, make it a haven that “Man, your home?” I remember in high school when all their friends would come over and the kids would be over. I would say, “What are you guys doing here? This is the best night ever.” Then I’d try not to be over-involved. [Laughter]

Dave: We’re going to go upstairs now.

Ann: I’d try to leave. But still, we think that the world is much more alluring than homes that love and care for people and see one another and see their friends.

I remember the boys saying, “I want my friends to come to our house because you see them. They always want to come to our house because you ask them questions that nobody’s asking them, and you care who they are.”

I thought, “Man, that’s such a great compliment.” Our kids’ friends and maybe our kids are struggling with their identity, with the things they are facing, and we can be a haven, we can be that light and a lighthouse in our corner of the world where we want our kids’ friends to come and our kids to be there.

Dave: Yes, I can just, as you tear up saying that, it makes me miss the stage you guys are in. As hectic and as anxious as it can feel, those were special days to have the boys and their friends sitting around our kitchen table—

Ann: —eating all the food in the house.

Dave: —eating all our food, drinking all our Cokes, and spending more of my money. They were precious days. Especially Ann had this vision of “We can parent them; we can impact them; we can speak life with them.”

Ann: “We can love them.”

Dave: I think you did that well.

Ann: Thanks.

Shelby: We’re going to hear more encouragement from everyone today to you if maybe you feel in this season that you’re unseen. The Wilsons and the Robbinses want you to know that they see you. That’s coming up in just a second.

But first, I’m Shelby Abbott and you’ve been listening to Dave and Ann Wilson with David and Meg Robbins on FamilyLife Today.

We want you to know that we are so grateful for you, especially if you are a partner with us here at FamilyLife Today. We want you to make your mark and be a part of FamilyLife’s mission of impacting lives through Christian teaching and family support.

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Or feel free to drop your donation in the mail, if you’d like. Our address is FamilyLife, 100 Lake Hart Drive, Orlando, Florida 32832.

If you feel unseen in this back-to-school season, here’s some specific encouragement just for you.

Ann: I think at this time of the year you can feel alone, especially if you have special circumstances that you’re dealing with as a parent or a family. We at FamilyLife want to give a special shout out to those of you who have kids with any kind of learning disabilities whether it is diagnosed or undiagnosed. “Well done! We see you. You’ve got this.”

Families with kids with disabilities, learning and physical disabilities, that’s weighing on you and you’re contemplating that thinking, “Man, that is not easy,” so “Way to go! We’re cheering for you.”

Dave: How about the teachers? I coached at the high school for 12 years, so I was around a lot of you teachers. “You guys are heroes from kindergarten and first grade through middle school, I don’t know how you do it; high school, God bless you.”

Ann: What a calling!

Dave: “We celebrate you. Thank you for pouring into our kids.”

Meg: Also, to moms out there and maybe dads, too, I know sometimes for me back to school can reinforce this feeling of being tempted to look at other people and compare and say, “Man, things are so busy. I can’t get it together. I’m already behind. I’m already putting junk in their lunch,” or whatever.

Ann: Or “Look how cute that kid’s dressed up, and my daughter’s wearing her pajamas to school.” [Laughter]

Meg: “It’s okay. You’re not alone in your survival.” I have to remind myself even for the more serious things where I feel like I’m dropping the ball or feeling…God’s grace is for those moments, and He sees me and He’s with me and He covers over all of those things.

David: For you parents who are ready for your kids to go back to school and have got it all lined up or homeschool parents as you’re preparing, maybe you are like us families in transition years, we have one going to college and one going to ninth grade, maybe some of you have a kindergartener for the first time, we at FamilyLife are praying for you. Let’s pray right now.

Ann: That’s what I was going to say.

David:

Lord, thank You for the kids of those who are listening right not. Thank You that You know them and every hair on their heads. You created them in the womb exactly who they were meant to be, and Your story is being written on their lives. Thanks for the part we get to play as parents, God. Lift our eyes to You. Let us surrender fully and speak life into our kids as we navigate this overwhelming season. Amen.

Ann: Amen.

Dave: Amen.

Shelby: Coming up next week, Debra Fileta is going to join Dave and Ann Wilson to talk about the power of introspection and eternal healing in order to see lasting change in our lives. That’s next week. We hope you’ll join us.

On behalf of Dave and Ann Wilson, I’m Shelby Abbott. We will see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

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