The Anxious Years
Every parent knows the big, dramatic moments — the meltdown, the slammed door, the sleepless night before an exam. Fewer people talk about the quiet, ordinary worry that sits underneath, most days, for years.
Paperback, ebook, audio
About the book
The Anxious Years draws on years spent talking with worried parents and their teenagers, in and out of the therapy room, about what actually helps: not fixing the worry, but making it small enough to live with.
The result is a practical, warm book about the ordinary, unglamorous work of staying close to a teenager who is finding things hard — and about looking after yourself while you do it.
School and library bulk orders include a short recorded introduction for staff. Links are inert in this demo.
“You don’t have to fix the worry. You just have to make it small enough to live with.”
Dr Ana Moreno · The Anxious Years
“Reassurance isn’t a fact you say once. It’s something you keep offering, quietly, for years.”
Dr Ana Moreno
“Your teenager doesn’t need a parent with all the answers. They need one who stays in the room.”
Dr Ana Moreno
The first time a mother told me she envied her daughter’s bad week, I thought I’d misheard her. Not the panic of it — the clarity. For three days everyone in the house knew exactly what was wrong: an exam, a friendship, a bad mark. There was a name for it, and a date it would end.
By the following month the exam was long over and the worry hadn’t gone anywhere. It had just stopped having a reason. Her daughter still couldn’t get to sleep, still checked the front door twice, still said ‘I’m fine’ in the voice that means the opposite. Nobody called this a crisis. There was no single thing to point at, which is part of why it went on so long.
This book is about that unnamed, ongoing worry — not the dramatic kind that gets a label attached, but the quiet, everyday kind that just keeps showing up. I don’t have a way to make it disappear. What I have is a way to understand it, and some very ordinary things that make it smaller.
Excerpt fictional