Children Under Stress |
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Stress is by no means an exclusively adult problem. Children can suffer from the effects of harmful stress every bit as much. In fact, stress is all the more difficult for children to handle because they are not yet in a position to think it through and isolate its sources to see how these affect them personally, in the way that adults can.
Because children cannot be expected to help themselves in the same way as adults, they need and deserve plenty of guidance in stress management. Children from broken or unstable homes are more obvious candidates for stress-related problems, but all children will experience stress in some form, more or less, as part of growing up. The transition from the security of the womb to the challenge of the world outside is the greatest- and perhaps most stressful - of all the life-changes we share. The subsequent years of childhood, especially the years up to the age of 5, continue to be a time of enormous changes, which often follow each other in rapid succession.
This is when a child learns to walk, to talk, to feed him or herself, to relate to others within the close circle of the family and the wider context of school, to distinguish right from wrong, to assess possible sources of danger, and take the right action accordingly. It is a time of almost constant adjustment to new situations and given that stress is so closely linked to various forms of change, it is easy to appreciate just how stressful life may seem to young children. Classic childhood stress symptoms may include a tendency to stammer, which most usually develops around the age of 4-5, when fluent speech is normally achieved, or a tendency to tell lies.
Such manifestations of stress are usually quite easily dealt with, and short-lived, but they all require prompt attention. Children have to be taught to cope with stress from an early age: if this can be achieved successfully, it will provide them with a sound foundation for handling more complex forms of stress later in life. It is therefore very important for adults to be able to identify the sort of situations which may cause individual children difficulties - these may be as various as a fear of the dark, or of being left alone, learning how to share things, or how to take teasing.
Given that children have everything to learn as they embark upon their lives, it is not surprising that they frequently experience feelings of uncertainty, and as we have seen, uncertainty and stress often go in tandem. Children need firm and fair direction to overcome these uncertainties, and encouragement to help them to learn to make their own decisions as a first step towards coping successfully with stress.
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