While reading The No Worries Guide to Raising Your Anxious Child I had to pause when I read about the risks that a child with mental health issues presents to the parents of that child1. Parents of children with mental health issues are far more likely to have narrow views of success and fall into perfectionism.

They're more likely to have their own mental health issues.

Society expects them to be perfect parents that don't mind the outbursts of an anxious child. Society expects them to be so perfect that their anxious child doesn't have any "embarrassing" outbursts at all.

What really made me pause was thinking back to a story from a friend of the family. They have adopted a child that has many developmental issues due to the drug and alcohol use of the biological parents.

One day while at the hospital while in the middle of a multi-day mental health breakdown by the child she was told to take the kid home or face arrest for child abandonment. This mental breakdown was resulting in physical abuse of the other children in the house, and of my friend. The staff at the hospital could see the abuse happening because it was happening to them.

The real issue at the hospital was that they didn't want to bug the on-call people in their child ward because it was late. Only when my friend pushed hard about the abuse happening to 3 and 4-year-old children at home and proved it with GoPro recordings of her working to keep those kids safe did the hospital back down on having her arrested and charged.

What's extra baffling about this is the mental health professionals that just didn't want to deal with the problem. My friend was supposed to be a perfect parent and take the abuse or have some scheme to deal with a brain that will never fully develop.

Sure the world says that Canada has Universal Health Care, but we don't. We don't cover mental health. We leave parents out to dry with kids that need help. We were once told it would be at least 5 years before we could get anxiety help for our child who scored as high as possible on the anxiety scale.

Even if you don't have kids, let's try to extend some empathy to parents, recognizing that they're at high risk of their own mental health issues.