Science says that parents still stress out and lose sleep by worrying about their adult children

It is worldwide known that parents worry about their well being of their child. When the child is young, a parent continuously stresses out if they are okay during school period, if they will get injured during play-time or if they will get sick. But when years pass these worries transform into other worries such as their child getting a college education or if their child deals with any illegal actions like doing drugs or drinking alcohol and driving drunk. 

All of this is expected to fade throughout the years when the child becomes an adult and starts living on his own. But how true is this? A study was done recently on middle-aged parents whose kids no longer lived with them. 

The study included 186 married couples that no longer had their kids live with them because their kids were fully grown adults. The couple’s part in the study was to tell how stressful life was even after their children were all grown up.

Three questions were asked for every parent to answer.

1. How much do they support their children by communicating, interacting or helping them during a financial crisis?
2. How much do they get stressed over their adult children? 
3. How much sleep did they get, and if the worry of their children interfered with their sleep?

The questions were to be answered from a scale of one to eight. With eight being the least often and one being the most often. The results showed that even after the couples’ children were adults, the sleep schedule changed based on the worry the middle-aged parents had for their children. Most of them claimed that the stress would give them panic attacks at night and it would not let them sleep. The mothers had a bigger problem sleeping because they stressed a lot about their children, while the fathers couldn’t sleep because of the stress of supporting their children financially.