Of course you worry. You care about them more than anything in the world. Our kids are, as Joan Didion famously said in The Year of Magical Thinking, our hostages to fortune. They make us vulnerable, children do. They are our hearts running around outside our body.

So yeah, we worry. We want to make sure they get home safe. We want to make sure they’re feeling OK. We want to make sure they keep their grades up. We want to make sure they don’t do dumb stuff. We want them to be successful and happy and secure. We can’t stand the thought of anything happening to them.

But the worry—the anxiety—is our problem. It is our cross to bear. Not theirs. So we have to shut up about it. We have to keep it to ourselves (or to our spouses or our therapists or our own parents). We don’t get to saddle our kids with it. We definitely don’t get to bother them with it.

Let them live their life. Let them make mistakes. They get to decide if they call us when they get home. They don’t have to tell us how school went or if anything is bothering them.

That’s the whole point. We’re trying to raise self-sufficient humans. Kids that will eventually be independent, competent people. And that means we have to let them experience their lives. We have to let them learn to navigate the real world in their own way.

P.S. If you’ve been here for a while, or if you also follow Daily Stoic, you’ll know how much of a Joan Didion fan I am (in fact, my office chair is the same chair that Didion herself once wrote in, and the table we use in our podcast studio once belonged to her as well).

I highly recommend picking up one of her books if you haven’t already. The Year of Magical Thinking (get it from The Painted Porch here) is one of my favorites. Although the themes are heavy—Didion is writing about life after the unexpected death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, as well as dealing with the grave illness of her only daughter—it’s a beautiful book from a writer I consider one of the greatest of all time.