Stress in Young People – the Facts
Like adults, children and young people react to life events differently for many reasons - for example because of the way they see people close to them behave –a father who gets furious in traffic jams, a mother who loses her temper when she has too much to do - and because their psychological make up varies. Some can take huge amounts of stress, but many cannot.
They also have different trigger points – for example some will get stressed if they forget their PE kit, others won’t care.
You can suffer stress from the moment you are born. Here is a list of some things that may indicate your child or teenager is suffering from stress:
- Increased irritability
- Heightened sensitivity to criticism
- Eating more or less
- Indigestion
- Sleeping too much or too little
- Difficulty getting to sleep and early morning waking
- Memory lapses
- Inability to concentrate
- Poor judgment
- Seeing only the negative
- Anxious or racing thoughts
- Constant worrying
- Moodiness
- Agitation, inability to relax
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Sense of loneliness and isolation
- Depression or general unhappiness
- Aches and pains
- Diarrohea or constipation
- Nausea, dizziness
- Chest pain, rapid heartbeat
- Frequent colds
- Isolating themselves from others
- Procrastinating or neglecting responsibilities
- Nervous habits (e.g. nail biting, pacing)
How to tackle stress
Work out the triggers and the responses
Talk to your child about what is making them stressed. Don’t rule out the fact that it may be you that is causing or adding to the problem. Talk to them with understanding or else you will end up making them more stressed.
If there is someone else in the family better able to talk with empathy and kindness to them, someone they are more likely to confide in, ask them to have the conversation.
The child needs to work out what is causing the stress and then think about how they are reacting to it. Sometimes thinking about how you could behave differently to stressful situations can make you feel more in control of the problem – and more able to see a solution.
For example, what if the child is reacting to school work they find hard to do by ignoring homework and getting behind in their studies (and grumpy at home)? The answer then would be to have a discussion with the child and the teachers at school to get some extra support.
Time management
Children aren’t born with the ability to manage their time – they have to learn how to do it. If your time management could be better, maybe theirs could as well. So much stress is cause by poor time management and procrastination . Teach them how to manage their time better and stop avoiding doing things they need to do and the stress levels will drop.
Big picture
Help them to set their stresses in context – how important will this problem seem next week, next month, next year?
Be positive
Help your children be positive about all their good features and the ones they like less. Negative thoughts are a positive drain on the body and can lead easily to stress.
Relax
Help them to understand that they need to find time for relaxation with family and friends or alone. And if they are relaxing too much ie watching TV and spending time on the computer because they are ways of avoiding what they have to do – help them recognise how stressful that is in the long run.
Further advice and information
There is a good factsheet from the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists for young people about coping with stress which has lots of useful links to other information. It’s available to read in Arabic on the same link.
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinfo/mentalhealthandgrowingup/32copingwithstress.aspx
Also:
http://helpguide.org/mental/stress_signs.htm#signs
http://kidshealth.org/parent/emotions/feelings/stress.html
How GEMS Can Help
If you are faced with a child or teenager who won’t talk about stressing them, school may be able to help. There may be a counsellor or a favourite teacher there who the student does feel safe to open up to. Just go in and ask.
© GEMS Education
