Stress and Your Child: Helping Kids Cope with the Strains and Pressures of Life

But by teaching healthy coping strategies, you'll prepare your kids to manage stress. Things like school and their social life can sometimes create pressures that can Tell your child when you notice that something's bothering him or her.
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• How kids experience stress | leondumoulin.nl
• Tips To Reduce Family Stress
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• 5 High-Stress Family Situations & How to Deal with Them

Sleep changes, either trouble sleeping or sleeping much more than usual. Below are five types of stress situations and how to handle them: Answer all their questions. Maintain your own composure. Understand that children may blame themselves. Remain on civil terms with your ex-spouse. Ongoing parental conflict following a divorce is one of the strongest predictors of negative outcomes for kids.

You can be a good role model for behavior regardless of whether your ex-spouse is doing so. Try to keep limits and rules at each home as similar as possible. Kids can get used to different rules at different places as long as they are consistent in each. Illness is extraordinarily stressful regardless of whom it affects. It cannot be adequately covered in this short article. Please reach out to your extended circle of support, and try these tips: Kids thrive on predictability, even small routines. Maintaining normalcy is important. Avoid the impulse to overindulge or overprotect your kids.

It only sends messages of fragility, incompetence, or doubt about their ability to get through this difficult situation.

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• How kids experience stress.
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Financial uncertainty can strain a family. Kids pick up on cues from their parents, so you can assume that children will pick up on parent stress and anxiety. Yet kids may have no context at all for understanding what is going on.

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Explain any changes in standard of living that will affect their lives, and answer questions as honestly as you can. Listen to your child. Ask your child to tell you what's wrong. Listen attentively and calmly — with interest, patience, openness, and caring. Avoid any urge to judge, blame, lecture, or say what you think your child should have done instead. The idea is to let your child's concerns and feelings be heard. Try to get the whole story by asking questions like "And then what happened? And let your child take his or her time, too. Comment briefly on the feelings you think your child was experiencing.

For example, you might say "That must have been upsetting," "No wonder you felt mad when they wouldn't let you in the game," or "That must have seemed unfair to you. Put a label on it. Many younger kids do not yet have words for their feelings. If your child seems angry or frustrated, use those words to help him or her learn to identify the emotions by name.

Putting feelings into words helps kids communicate and develop emotional awareness — the ability to recognize their own emotional states. Help your child think of things to do. If there's a specific problem that's causing stress, talk together about what to do. Encourage your child to think of a couple of ideas. You can start the brainstorming if necessary, but don't do all the work.

Will the noise make you crazy? Allow for more time to get things done. Time pressure is a universal stressor, but it hits some parents particularly hard.

Researchers in Sweden report that mothers are more burdened by time pressure than fathers, and the women most affected are either highly educated, financially stressed, or lacking in social support Gunnarsdottir et al ; Gunnarsdottir et al You might think you can't afford to change your schedule, but consider: Moreover, compared with adults, young children take longer to react, longer to check their impulses and longer to learn Lee et al ; Yim et al So it's likely that many families would benefit from adjusted expectations.

If running late is driving you crazy, start earlier, and don't assume your little slow-poke is trying to thwart you. When bad things happen, re-appraise the situation. Sometimes it doesn't matter how many good thoughts you think: But even then, there is a lot you can do to cope.

Studies show that people handle stress better when they reconsider the situation from a new angle Troy et al For example, HIV patients have better quality of life when they focus on the good things they experience, like improvements in their personal relationships Moscowitz et al ; Caracco et al And it appears that even a little positive thinking can make a measurable difference in how we feel. In one study, researchers asked college students to spend 15 minutes writing about the most stressful event currently affecting their lives.

Half the students were told only to explore their feelings; the other half were asked to engage in full-blown, positive cognitive reappraisal, to analyze the challenges and opportunities presented by their stressor, and to view their coping strategies in a positive light.

Immediately afterwards, the researchers evaluated emotional and psychosomatic symptoms in each student. What did they learn? Students who'd practiced cognitive reappraisal felt better than did students who'd merely rehashed their emotions Batenberg and Das Just as interesting, the researchers discovered they could improve the moods of people in the "emotional rehash" group by giving them this simple bit of upbeat feedback: I admire the way you dealt with this situation. Learning from these experiences is very important. Whenever you will experience something similar, you know better how to deal with it.

I wish you good luck in the future. By contrast, students experienced no improvements when they received mere sympathy: I think it was an impressive story. It must have been intense to experience something like that. I experienced something quite similar, and I recognize a lot in your story. I understand how it must have felt and the impact it must have had on your life. So positive cognitive reappraisal can help us bounce back, and that may be why parents who use cognitive reappraisal are less likely to engage in counterproductive, over-reactive discipline Lorber But what if there isn't a silver lining to think about, not even the prospect of a lesson learned?

There is another type of cognitive reappraisal that doesn't focus on sunshine.

It's what happens when we stop dwelling on our personal emotional reactions, and try to instead to view the situation with more objectivity and detachment. It's not the same as suppression, because we don't try to bottle up our feelings. But we try to step outside ourselves and see the big picture, reflecting, for example, that loss is part of life Shiota and Levenson Is your sense of empathy stressing you out?

Get in touch with the more clear-headed, problem-solving side of your empathic nature. When your kid is miserable, you feel her pain, and that can be a good thing: It may motivate you to help. But the trouble with this sort of empathy -- what psychologists call "affective empathy" -- is that it's a double-edged sword.

That's probably why parents who rate themselves as highly empathic can become over-reactive when their kids are upset Emery et al They get too stressed out, and the results can lead to them to become snappish, harsh, or controlling Joosen et al Shaun Ho and his colleagues have used hormone tests and brain scans to better understand what's going on.

In a study asking mothers to participate in a parenting simulation game, women with lots of affective empathy got a bigger hit of cortisol when they had to make decisions about distressed, unhappy kids. They also experienced heightened activity in parts of the hypothalamus and amygdala, regions of the brain linked with anxiety and stress Ho et al So affective empathy causes stress, and that can undermine parenting.

But that doesn't mean we'd be better off as sociopaths. There is another type of empathy, called cognitive empathy, that involves taking another person's perspective and imagining what would make him feel better. It's more cerebral and reflective, and it doesn't rev up the stress response system: In Ho's study, moms who emphasized cognitive empathy showed the least stress reactivity during decision making, and their judgment calls were more accurate.

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This suggests we shouldn't feel guilty when we step back from our children's problems and try to see them in a more objective light. We don't have to live their bad moods to be sensitive. On the contrary, we might actually serve kids better by practicing a little detachment. Poor sleep makes life difficult, so you want to fix sleep problems whenever you can. But some disruptions are inevitable, especially when you've got young children. What should you do? By now it should be clear what not to do.

Getting resentful, ruminating or worrying about your inability to function the next day isn't going to help. As we've already seen, negative thoughts activate your brain's stress circuits, so worrying will make it even harder to fall asleep when you finally get the chance. Besides, your kids are likely to sense your emotions, and that will make it harder for them to sleep Teti et al This leads to an irony: People struggling with poor sleep are better off when they give up.

Not on trying to find practical solutions to their children's sleep problems. With a little troubleshooting, you might hit on a winning strategy. Read more about it here. Instead, what's helpful is giving up on being a control freak, on straining to get everything right. Research shows that people adapt better when they avoid making emotional judgments about the state of their tiredness, when they stop calculating their hours, stop worrying about tomorrow, and focus instead on acceptance and making the best of things.

In fact, practicing this change of attitude is an effective treatment for insomnia Ong et al Help children cope with their own stresses, and teach siblings how to work out their differences. Kids aren't born with an instinct for emotional self-regulation.

They have to develop it, and they take their cues from us. It begins with smart choices we can make with our infants, and continues throughout childhood: