This morning’s Wall Street Journal featured an article about the effect anxiety has on our lives. The story described an anxiety “sweet spot” – where one is neither too anxious nor too laid-back – that actually improves people’s performance in stressful situations.

It’s no secret – at least to me, a former teacher, and other education professionals I know – that anxiety disorders are on the rise. So many students we see in schools are plagued by some form of general anxiety, varying in degrees from moderate to severe. As a teacher this was worrisome; as a parent, it is really, really scary.

I will pause to point out the obvious irony here: I have anxiety about my anxiety over my daughter. Yep, I caught that too. But as any truly honest parent will admit, I’m kind of neurotic when it comes to my child.

This morning’s article gave examples of high and low anxiety situations, and how people’s attitude toward them had an impact on the outcome. One example was a dinner party; if you are so relaxed about it, you could fail to plan and the dinner party won’t be fun because you’ll be toiling away at the last minute. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you are so anxious about a job interview, you could end up frozen with fear when you finally arrive, after days of over-preparing and worrying.

A “healthy” amount of anxiety is when you are sufficiently concerned about an event to make steps to plan and prepare for it, but not so relaxed that you fail to see its importance. I feel like achieving this balance professionally is possible for me, but as a parent – how do I moderate my worry? And, consequently, what effects will my worry have on my child as she gets older? Will she sense and inherit my anxiety?

I think a lot of the issue here is about control. And to be clear, I’m speaking here about people who get anxious about things, rather than those with diagnosed disorders. Knowing when to let go is a hard lesson for many of us to learn in our professional lives, and often even harder as we become parents.

At work, I am an admitted perfectionist. When I’m working on a project, I take it through several rounds of revisions and feedback before I submit a final piece. And I could probably drag out this process more than I do, but over time I’ve learned to set boundaries for myself. I force myself to let go, and relinquish control after a set amount of time.

But letting go as a parent? I recently had a mini-meltdown on my daughter’s first birthday, because it occurred to me that I will spend less time with her in her second year than I did during her first. And when she goes with a baby-sitter or to daycare, I won’t be the primary decision-maker, the one to solve the problems, the one to soothe her if something goes wrong.

When I was teaching my goal was to get my students to learn independently; obviously I want my daughter to become independent too. So why can’t I find a sweet spot with this?

How do you balance your worries as a parent? What are your strategies for managing parental and professional anxiety?