How Side Car Parenting Is Hurting Our Kids

Sissy Goff
Published Aug 23, 2023

“She’s just like me. I struggled in the exact same ways when I was her age.” I can’t even begin to count the times I’ve heard parents say these words in my office. I am a counselor in Nashville seeing kids and teens daily. It’s funny . . . it’s typically said out of a concerned place, a desire to help kids have tools to battle their anxiety, but also with some kind of angsty pride. She’s just a chip off the old anxious, panicky block. And what I picture with those parents is the Adam West Batman show I watched after school. Batman is on his motorcycle, with Robin crammed into the sidecar next to him. Batman is speeding recklessly through the streets of Gotham, outracing danger and outwitting every criminal who comes his way. In the meantime, I can’t imagine how carsick Robin had to be.

The Premise:

My experience will be his experience.

Many parents think, Because this child is most like me, he’ll feel anxious just as I did. So we not only recognize the anxiety, but we sometimes overinterpret behaviors as anxious that might not necessarily be. In the therapy world, it’s called projection, “the process of displacing one’s feelings onto a different person.”

I had a young girl I worked with on and off for several years. Her parents were divorced, and it was her dad who brought her in. The first time I met her and her dad, he talked about how similar the two of them were. He said, “She just has so much anxiety. I did too, at her age. She won’t do certain activities that I know she would like and probably do well. Her anxiety holds her back and seems to impact her confidence the most. She doesn’t seem to believe that she can or is good enough. I’m just worried that the other girls don’t like her because she doesn’t assert herself.”

Where It’s Coming From:

My own anxious past

Let me say that since I met these two kind individuals, my experience has been very different from the father’s description. I experience this dad as unassuming. And I would actually describe his daughter as overconfident, much more like her mom. She does have some degree of anxiety but also has a driven personality, which I think she potentially interprets as anxious because of her dad’s words over the years. She’s involved in a lot of activities and seems to feel very comfortable with the spotlight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her hang back, whether from an activity or from engaging socially. I worry more about her sounding like she’s bragging to her friends, rather than appearing insecure. If I had to guess, I would say the child the father was describing in my office that first day was much more who he was at his daughter’s age than his daughter.

What It Looks Like:

Projection

Because her dad saw them as similar, he assumed his daughter must be having the same emotions and experiences he did. His own insecurities, at each stage of his daughter’s development, were rising up in him afresh. He struggled with friendships because of his own self-consciousness and lack of confidence. The fact that his daughter is left out must be for the same reason. And then everything he sees—or we see—is through that lens. We’re back to the confirmation bias we talked about in chapters 1 and 2. For this girl and for many I see, the tragedy is that our perception of what’s going on, based on our own projections, can keep us from seeing what really is going on. Her dad can’t help her with what is actually wrong because he’s so locked into what he perceives is wrong. And sadly, that perception has now become his daughter’s too.

How It Affects Them:

They jump on board, shut down, or rise up to take care of us.

In the case of this girl, she sees herself as her dad does. She’s aware that she struggles some relationally. But she sees it as anxiety-based, rather than unawareness-based, as I do. She thinks her anxiety sometimes causes her friends not to include her. I believe her overconfidence and unawareness of it sometimes causes her friends not to include her.

In other cases, I see kids who do the opposite. When their parents are over-identifying and projecting, those parents often have more emotion than the child does. A dad is anxious his son won’t make the football team, just like his own experience in high school. So he pushes. And pushes and pushes. He gets angry at his son for not practicing enough. Or a mom has more emotion over her daughter’s exclusion from a group of friends than her daughter does. In both cases, the kids just stop talking. They stop sharing their worries with their parents. I have lost count of the number of kids who’ve told me, “I can’t talk to my mom or dad about it anymore because they make a bigger deal out of it than I do.” Or even worse, your children feel the need to take care of your feelings, rather than feeling their own.

I have a two-year-old nephew who is the light of my life these days. We were outside together not long ago. He had walked around the opposite side of the car from me to get in. All of a sudden, I couldn’t find him. He hadn’t gone far but had wandered across the neighbor’s driveway—without a glance to see if a car was coming, I’m sure. I panicked. And then totally overreacted. I grabbed him and angrily put him in time-out. “Don’t ever walk across the driveway again without a grown-up watching, Henry!” He immediately got so teary, put his little hands on either side of my face, and said, “Be okay, Diddy.” I melted. My anxiety was definitely bigger than his because, well, he’s two. But my anxiety was also bigger than the situation warranted. And sweet little two-year-old Henry felt the need to protect me. It’s not a kid’s job. And it’s often not even about them when we start sidecar parenting—or aunt-ing, in my case.