I had a look at the exchange you had with Guyomar, I think you can keep the 'ne' if you use the comparative 'no less no more', which conveys the idea of 'as much worried but not more'. - Nous ne sommes ni plus ni moins inquiets que ne l'étaient nos parents quand nous étions jeunes. Side note: in your sentence you replaced 'equally' by 'seulement aussi', these are working too : tout autant, tout aussi. Regarding your sentence, the construction "nous ne sommes que" is ok, but it works better with a noun in place of an adjective : - nous ne sommes que de pauvres hères - nous ne sommes qu'une poignée d'irréductibles Yet in some cases, both (noun and adjectives) seem to fit : - nous ne sommes encore que (des) débutants et pourtant ... So, I'm not definitively condemning your sentence because grammatically speaking it is not utterly wrong. I think it is more a question of flow, as it, it sounds very weird, but with some change in the rhythm like in the proposal below I think it could work. The break introduced by the adverbial group allows in a way to understand the "qu'aussi inquiets" unusual construction. - Nous ne sommes, au final, qu'aussi inquiets que ne l'étaient nos parents à notre âge. Anyway, I would not recommend it, prefer either "nous ne sommes que" with "ni plus ni moins" or the direct "nous sommes" with "tout aussi". In a completely different way but focusing on the meaning : - Finalement nous faisons face à la même inquiétude que celle qu'ont connu nos parents quand ils avaient notre âge.

A correct way to say it is: Nous sommes aussi inquiets que nos parents l'étaient quand nous étions jeunes. The construction for the comparative is: X (être) plus/aussi/moins (adjectif) que Y Perhaps you were thinking of the "ne" explétif and that's why you asked this question and formulated your statement as such. The "ne" explétif is only used with comparisons of inequality - Ex: nous sommes PLUS inquiets que nos parents ne l'étaient quand nous étions jeunes.