Anxious? Blame Your Mom

A friend sent me a link to an article in Slate entitled, Anxiety gender gap: Are women really more anxious than men? – By Taylor Clark – Slate Magazine.

In this article, Clark ruminates about recent research suggesting that the reason that women are diagnosed with anxiety disorders twice as often as men might not be because we’re hardwired to be nervous but rather because our moms screwed us up at a young age.

Clark notes a slight predisposition of female rats to have a bigger reaction to stress than male rats, which suggests that there’s a hormonal difference between men and women that make women more likely to experience anxiety in response to stress. According to Clark, this difference isn’t significant enough to explain the two-to-one difference in anxiety in human women and men, though.

What Clark, and apparently also Michelle Craske, an “anxiety expert” from UCLA, point the finger at as the cause for higher levels of anxiety in women than in men is “socialization.” From the article:

In my book Nerve, I call this the “skinned knee effect”: Parents coddle girls who cry after a painful scrape but tell boys to suck it up, and this formative link between emotional outbursts and kisses from mom predisposes girls to react to unpleasant situations with “negative” feelings like anxiety later in life. On top of this, cultural biases about boys being more capable than girls also lead parents to push sons to show courage and confront their fears, while daughters are far more likely to be sheltered from life’s challenges. If little Olivia shows fear, she gets a hug; if little Oliver shows fear, he gets urged to overcome it.

I’m trying not to have a knee-jerk negative reaction to his insinuation that moms are making their daughters into nervous wrecks. (Besides, blaming our moms for our neuroses is so 20th Century.)

Aside from feeling defensive, I do have some problems with the assertion that parenting differences account for so much of why women are more anxious than men.

First, from all that I’ve read about attachment, “coddling” a child of either sex when they’ve experienced a trauma will help that child to feel more confident, secure, and loved than telling them to “man up.” If we’re going to use the parenting argument, it might be just as reasonable (if not more so) to note that children of both sexes are given a limited selection of emotions that are acceptable for them to express. For girls, tears and anxiety are acceptable, but anger and asserting for their own needs are not. For boys, it’s the reverse. Wouldn’t it be just as likely that girls grow up learning to express anxiety and depression more often not because those are reinforced but because the other emotions in the broad spectrum of human emotions are prohibited to them?

My second problem with this assertion is that it assumes that all “socialization” comes from parents. If this were true, why are homeschoolers constantly getting so darned much flack about how their kids are lacking in “socialization” by staying at home?  Seems to be that school-aged children and younger children who spend most of their daytime hours away from their parents are at least as likely to be “socialized” by teachers, peers, childcare workers, and babysitters as they are by their parents.

Let’s see some studies about the relative levels of anxiety between men and women who were homeschooled throughout their lives compared to those who spent all of their time in conventional schools before we go blaming the already maligned mother for her daughter’s jitters.

To Clark’s credit, he doesn’t blame mothers for all of the difference. He notes some pretty striking ways in which our culture reinforces the idea that women are anxious, including some that could be life-threatening:

…we buy into the fretful-women stereotypes far too often. Another report, for example, found significant differences in the way doctors respond to patients who report common stress symptoms like chest pain: Whereas men get full cardiac workups, women are more often told that they’re just stressed or anxious, and that their symptoms are in their heads.

I’m feeling anxious right now just thinking about the idea that if I told a doctor I was experiencing chest pain, I’m likely to be told that I’m a nutcase rather than be given proper medical attention. What about all of the other reasons women have to be anxious, like getting paid 70 cents on the dollar compared to men, or being more likely to be murdered by a loved one than by a stranger, or that if we take maternity leave and time after to care for our children we’ll be penalized in our professions?

Clark mentions another very important reason that levels of anxiety might be higher among women than among men: Women are more likely to see themselves as anxious and to report that they’re feeling anxiety than men are.

I know that in my house, my husband is much less likely to say that he’s anxious than I am. But he’s also much more likely to check the doors a dozen times, to drive back in front of the house to make sure he closed the garage door when he backed out of the driveway, and to check the knobs on the stove every time he walks by. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure those are signs of anxiety.

And this leads me to the third thing I don’t like about the “blame Mom” reason for higher levels of anxiety in women: it only explains why women are more likely than men to say they’re anxious, not why women are more likely to feel anxious. If men aren’t reporting their feelings of anxiety (or even labeling them as such to themselves), how do we know what they’re feeling? And what if women are labeling their emotions “anxiety” when they’re really pissed off or something else that’s not as acceptable for women to feel?