Stress At School

Going to school is a major step for all children. It is at school that they usually find themselves within a peer group proper for the first time, and inevitably, learning to cope and adapt, as they will later as adults in a broader society, creates stress. School brings children face to face with the competitiveness which they will experience at all stages in their working lives; one of the major childhood stressors is the way children are exposed to competitive stress earlier and earlier. For example, attending a nursery group is one of the recognized ways of minimizing the stress of going to 'proper' school at the age of 5, as required by law, but places in good nursery groups and play schools are always in too short supply for the demand, and even these places have to be competed for.

Some of the special stresses children commonly encounter at school include:

• Problems with work: all children now have to achieve a certain level of computer-literacy, which can cause special difficulties.

• Making friends: learning how to establish friendships, how to be popular and 'one of the crowd', or how to cope with losing a 'best friend'.

• Bullying.

• Disliking or being disliked by a particular teacher.

• Having fewer material possessions, or less pocket money than school friends.

• Taking exams.

• Changes in school: not just from kindergarten to infants, primary to secondary, but perhaps from one area to another, with accompanying loss of friends and changes in the curriculum.

• Being a gifted child, which can create the special stresses associated with being the ‘odd man out’, excluded from the main crowd.

• Unreasonable parental expectations.

• The disruption of teacher shortages and strikes.

More Children Stress