Like so many parents, I’m a panic junkie

On that record-breaking, sweltering day at the end of July, my three-year-old son did a pirouette in the paddling pool — ‘look at this Mama!’ — then tripped, slid under the surface and lay there on his back staring up at me through two foot of water. I was in the pool too, just an arm’s length away, and it seemed to me that I did nothing for ages. I had time to think: he looks so calm. Why isn’t he moving? And, why am I not moving? Then I had hauled him out and we were spluttering on the grass.

When he could speak, Cedd was more proud than scared: ‘I can go underwater! Did you see?’ But I felt the first stirrings of a familiar fear. There was clearly no reason to worry. He was fine. Children are forever sinking in baths and swimming pools. But the words ‘secondary drowning’ had appeared in my mind, and a half-remembered news story — something about a boy who died of water in the lungs a clear week after a light dunking…

An Aussie called John Marsden has recently written a book called The Art of Growing Up, about the blight of over-anxious middle-class parents like me, both in Oz and across the West. We worriers are toxic, says Marsden, not just for ourselves but for our offspring, who pick up on it all. ‘The scale of the problem is massive. The issue of emotional damage is pandemic,’ he told the Guardian last month. ‘The level of anxiety in kids is something I’ve never seen before and I don’t know how it can be improved.’

He might start by understanding it from the parents’ perspective, and I don’t think the solution is as simple as telling us all to get a grip. My feeling is that we’re somehow addicted to the panic.