The mother of all worries: why do women fret about their children more than men do?

I am the mother of two young people, one still a teenager, who work hard and play hard. Living in London, this means they often end up in a club in Brixton, at a party in Peckham or a rave in Hackney. “Pre-drinks” at someone’s house or the pub happens at around the time I’m brushing my teeth, and the serious partying doesn’t get going until midnight and they are unlikely to be home until the small hours.

Generally, they are good at keeping in touch and I usually head for bed in receipt of a brief text message, certainly from the younger one: “probs back around 3, love you”. These days, 3am counts as an early night.

So far, so good. Except it isn’t. Not for me. It never is. However many times I tell myself that they are sensible and need their independence, that London is, basically, a safe city and that lone rapists or marauding cab drivers are rare, I find it hard to fall asleep. Until I hear the click – or, more likely, the bang – of that front door, I am gripped by a rumbling worry, drifting in and out of sleep, tortured in the hours before dawn by details of the worst-case scenario.

Meanwhile, my husband slumbers deeply beside me and often shares a jolly morning breakfast with weary returning revellers while I spend too many Sundays in a furious sleep-deprived fug.

Welcome to the uncomfortable world that is maternal anxiety. I am not talking about the kind of stress about which clinicians write learned papers, that can lead to insecure attachment or severe childhood disturbance, or even of those moments of crisis that infect all parents with rightful concern: night-long vigils over a whimpering toddler with a soaring temperature or dry-mouthed tension before an all- important exam result.

No, I mean that run-of-the-mill, day in, day out, low-level worry about everything from the risks of everyday living to an entire life trajectory that can all too easily feel as if it is taking over your life.

One friend was asked by a doctor if she had already lost a child, so great was her concern about her son’s peanut allergy. Another told me, “My daughter, now in her early 20s, got hold of her medical notes from the GP going back to when she was a baby. She kept asking, ‘What was this for, what was this for?’ I couldn’t remember. I just knew it was me being the over-anxious parent.”

Recently, a young mother said to me, with passion, “I get so angry with myself. Always worrying! My husband says, just stop it – but I can’t.”

In my experience, these furrow-browed conversations take place almost entirely between women. It can feel like a universal, if covert, language that stretches across age, class and national barriers, a highly addictive, semi-satisfying trade-off for all those troubled days and disturbed nights.

It also feels rather old fashioned. Here we are in the early 21st century questioning everything sex- and gender-related, including the physical body itself, yet women still appear to carry so much of the petty emotional burden of family life and then beat themselves up about it. One single-parent friend describes the division of emotional labour in her now defunct marriage as follows: “I fell into that classic trap of worrying about the children while I was at work and worrying about work when I was with the children, while he managed to detach from worries over the children to such an extent that his colleagues didn’t even know he was a father!”

Another mother, who also worries endlessly about adolescents out late at night, says, “Most Friday and Saturday nights, I have this hysterical and unresolved conversation with myself about whether I am neurotic or my husband is selfish, or it’s a bit of both.He is probably right to say everything will be fine and sometimes I find his lack of concern calming, a balance to my worst-case scenario fantasies. But, secretly, I still believe he can switch off so completely because I am always on fret duty.”

So can we change any of this? It is not so easy, according to psychotherapist and writer Graham Music. who, while “not wanting to go down the path of biological determinism”, says, “There is some evidence from a research perspective of a link between the kind of hormones that mothers in particular release when they are breastfeeding – oxytocin – and obsessional symptoms.”

Motherhood as a form of OCD? Hardly reassuring. According to Music, “It’s true that, in our culture, females hold more worry / anxiety and males can protect themselves, be protected, by being strong and ‘problem solving’. Testosterone inures against worry and can act as an antidepressant in its way.”

There are worried fathers, of course, but if most dads are dosing themselves up with their own natural tranquillisers, surely they are not doing much problem-solving? Shouldn’t we reverse the proposition and accept that it might be largely anxious mothers who are tackling the thorny, practical issues of family life?

After all, children and teens need caregivers who are alert to the difference between flu and meningitis, think ahead sufficiently to make sure they have everything they need for a journey or an exam, or scan the playground for those potentially toxic friends who can bring so much misery during the school years?

Of course, we all know mothers who tip into hysterical martyrdom for the “good of the children”. According to Music, “A lot of women complain but they do not want their position of prime worriers challenged by sensitive men either. And many quite like strong men, so I don’t think it’s straightforward.”

But even if we could all agree that a more equal sharing of worry was a good thing, it’s surprisingly hard to change ingrained habits, as we know from long years of debate about how to share housework more evenly.

In the meantime, then, let’s stick up for anxious parents and respect their concerns for what they are: an emotionally charged way of paying necessary attention. Frequently exhausting and depleting? Yes. Surplus to requirements on most occasions? Almost certainly. But let’s also recognise that worry is probably an inevitable and integral part of the process by which we produce independent-enough, happy-enough children.

I remember how touched I was to hear my mother, then well into her 70s, say that every night before she went to sleep she turned her mind to each of her middle-aged children “like a lighthouse beam searching out different parts of the dark sea”. During this nightly ritual, she was making her own assessment of how life was going for each of us.

Late in the day, I realised that she had, of course, spent a lot of her life fretting about us all over the years. Yet she did not let it cloud her, or our, apparent enjoyment of family life. What I remember from my childhood is not dark emotional clouds and panicked phone calls, but conversation, laughter, shared trips and adventures. That now seems the most momentous achievement of all.

Lizzie Sharp is a pseudonym

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKSZm7KiusOsq7KklWR%2FcX2VaJiun19lg3DAx55kpqeknbKzec6fZJqknGLEsL7RopysZaedxm6wzmauqKWVo3qnvsStZJqan6rBbsDHnqCrZZOdtq2w0Z6lZqWfp7JuwMeapWallaN6pbs%3D