My wife and I (I am a man), have a fifteen year old daughter. I, we, love her more than anything. She is funny, very good natured, astute and so on, and in many ways, a very easy girl to be with. But she is also the source of enormous anxiety for us both. She is very pretty, but, for want of a better word, chubby, and also dyslexic (and in the middle of GCSEs). Her weight causes my wife in particular incredible anxiety, and is exacerbating the depression she thinks is a part of her menopause. She blames herself, or her genetic inheritance, for the dyslexia, and me, or my GI, for the weight. This may not be entirely unreasonable, but it is also, I think, reductive, and hurtful. To add to the difficulty my wife's daughter, now in her mid-20s, is incredibly beautiful, and naturally slim, and we also appear to be surrounded by friends, whose tall, dare I say it, slim, children, effortlessly achieve A*s in all their exams before going to good universities (this may not be as true as it sometimes feels, but I am sure others know what I am talking about). At the moment I feel stuck in the middle, trying as best I can to get our daughter through exams, and to help her with general life issues, while also trying to shield her from my wife's depressive catastrophising about her, and to find ways for my wife to think in a less negative way.
I am sure that for some people on this forum these may seem comparatively trivial problems, but they don't feel trivial at the moment. I would welcome advice about how to help my daughter, but more to the point about how to see this in perspective, and to gain some distance from the pervasive feeling of catastrophe, that occasionally I can see as absurd. I know there's no magic wand, but a sense that things can and do change, often for the better would be a help (though just writing this down, and posting it, is a bit of a help in itself)