Stress and Your Child: Helping Kids Cope with the Strains and Pressures of Life
326
Stress and Your Child: Helping Kids Cope with the Strains and Pressures of Life
326eBook
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Overview
We like to think of childhood as a carefree, relaxed time of life, but the truth is, children today experience more stress than ever before: parents' fast-paced lifestyles, the frequent breakup of families, urban crime, schools in turmoil, and a host of other problems. However, according to Bettie B. Youngs, Ph.D., Ed.D, one of America's most admired experts on child psychology, children--by mastering skills of coping and self-awareness--can actually draw vitality from stress and channel it to promote health, fitness, and self-esteem.
Stress and Your Child helps parents understand the pressures that their children face and explores the essential ways to reduce, manage, and prevent stress from birth to age twenty. Dr. Youngs leads parents through each stage of their child's emotional and social development and teaches them:
-- How to recognize the physical and emotional signs of stress in children
-- How to understand school-related stress, including social pressures, personal safety, and test-taking
-- How parental stress affects children--and what parents can do to alleviate t
-- How teaching kids self-esteem and emotional honesty can help them cope wth stress
-- How diet, physical activity, and realistic schedules can help to minimize stress in children
Stress and Your Child is an invaluable parenting guide. No family can afford to be without it!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307775931 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2011 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 326 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
I first began to examine the thesis that children experience stress and to document the effects of stress in the childhood years when I was a classroom educator during the seventies. The school has always been a convenient setting to measure how children are faring: In place are norms for scholastic achievement, expectations and standards for appropriate behavior, and guidelines for measuring how children interact with others. A host of professionals—the classroom educator, school nurse, counselor, principal, vice-principal, support and special service personnel—all observe children on a somewhat regular basis. Because the school is a place where one observes, sorts, ranks, and rates children, it’s fairly easy to detect when a child fluctuates and deviates from those norms deemed typical.
Academic performance and emotional demeanor are not all that gets chronicled. Schools are often a source for vital health statistics on children, and school officials keep accurate records of students’ school attendance, a source rich in information (and implications) as to how children are faring in their families and neighborhoods.
In the late seventies, schools began to struggle under the challenge of finding ways to encourage children to attend school on a regular basis, to behave in school, and achieve there. The biggest task was to convince students that graduating was in their best interest. In the eighties (during my tenure as a university professor in educational administration), the challenge was much the same—how to reduce the number of kids who would rather spend the day at the beach or hang out in their neighborhoods instead of coming to school. There was a noticeable difference, however: an alarming increase in discipline problems, and in the number of students visiting the nurse’s office for illness and the counselor’s office for psychological caretaking. In response, a number of major national studies came out, complete with recommendations for improving the nation’s schools. Unfortunately, the much-touted reforms did little to curtail the number of youths who were permanently heading out the school doors, nor did it significantly increase the number of students experiencing scholastic success. On the contrary, the appalling number of students absent on any given day continued to increase, test scores continued to decline, and more and more children needed psychological counseling.
Many of the reform measures missed the mark because they concentrated on scholastic achievement and failed to address the underlying social problems that plagued children’s lives. For example, more and more children were experiencing chaotic or broken family lives; were derailed by drug or alcohol use; or were rebelling, confused by the inconsistency between the words and the actions of parents, educators, and the media. Children’s lives were now overwhelmed with stressors, each snowballing into problems far too complex for schools to address.
While mass and widespread attempts to improve scholastic achievement of the nation’s children proved generally hopeless, these efforts did manage to highlight the poor conditions of the schools. Not only was the mission to educate children left wanting, but kids weren’t faring so well either. Students were hurting—intellectually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When the spotlight was turned on the schools, it revealed that there were many despondent or often angry young people. Instead of children who were happy and had a zest and zeal for living, learning, and playing, there were signs of emotional duress too obvious to miss: increasing health problems, lethargy, sadness, melancholy, low self-esteem, an absence of goals, a sense of uselessness, hopelessness, despair, anger, and a real lack of inner joy and outer expressions of it.
Why was it that when we were doing more, things seemed to be getting worse? Aren’t children supposed to be joyous, energetic, and mischievous? Where had all that gone? Why were so many children showing signs of anger or apathy or both? Why were so few of these young people laughing and learning and being joyful? Why were youths inflicting violence on fellow students? Why were they living what seemed to be lives of quiet desperation? Why are children’s lives so stressful?
The results of my examination of the nature of stress in children was a book published in 1985 by Arbor House called Stress in Children. From its acceptance in the United States and abroad, I knew that others, too, had dispelled the idea that children were immune to stress and its consequences. I conducted hundreds of workshops in the States and abroad and the message was the same: More and more children are showing signs of increasing stress, strains, and pressures too obvious to dismiss. The notion that stress is present only in the high-powered world of the emotionally burdened business executive working under pressure was adjusted: Stress can affect anyone, regardless of occupation, status, or age.
Today, the toll of stress on children may be even greater than we suspect. One of the most significant and disturbing trends of recent years is the troubled generation of children who, according to a U.S. News & World Report study, are “unable to cope with the pressures of growing up in what they perceive as a world that is hostile and indifferent to them.” The statistics bear sad witness to this fact:
More than one in three children suffer stress-related illness, including dizziness, chest pains, wheezing, stomach problems, and headaches.
There are nearly 2,000 teenage suicides a year.
Fifteen percent of high school students are considered problem drinkers.
One-third of all American schoolchildren under the age of 18 use illegal drugs.
One-third of all violent crimes in America are committed by people under 20 years old.
Students carry an estimated 270,000 guns to school daily (homicides committed by 15-to-19-year-olds increased 61 percent between 1979 and 1989).
The school dropout rate continues to soar each year (it is now nearly 40 percent).
Each year one out of every ten teenage girls between 13 and 17 becomes pregnant (more than one million).
It is distressing to learn that our children are experiencing this much stress, that they have so many debilitating fears and anxieties, that they worry more than we might suspect, that they wish to be happier. It’s disconcerting to discover that in their desire to escape from pain, many children today (and at a younger age than ever before) take routes such as alcohol and drug abuse, delinquency, sexual involvement, acts of aggression and violence, running away from home—all paths that lead them into problems more overwhelming than those they are trying to escape. Yet it’s not as if parents are unaware of their kids’ difficulties: One in eight parents believes his or her children have mental or emotional problems; one in twenty parents admits his or her child has a drug problem.
There are no easy solutions to reducing stress in children, though it helps to understand children as social beings and to recognize the ways in which children develop and mature in each stage of growth and development. It also helps to understand the cultural revolution that is transforming so much of American life—spawning new mores, shifting values in the homeplace and the workplace, and redefining roles for both children and adults. Precisely because today’s times do give rise to many inconsistencies and contradictions for children and offer up a constant barrage of new and changing experiences for them, children need our help and guidance—more than ever. We must give our kids a diverse array of skills, some of which we may still be seeking to master ourselves. The good news is that with our help and guidance, children can acquire the necessary insights and skills to surmount life’s challenges. Those children who do learn self-awareness and effective methods for managing their response to stress, pressure, and strains are more likely to be healthy and happy, possess a zest and zeal for living, develop a healthy self-esteem, and lead fulfilling and rewarding lives.