What stresses a child?
Imagine entering a world within which you are completely dependent on others to meet all your needs, including helping you understand what is going on. In this world everything is initially unpredictable, you have no established criteria for understanding what is going on, and things seem to appear out of nowhere and disappear again for no known reason. Every experience is new, unknown and without any obvious meaning.
Then just as you’ve had enough similar experiences to start to identify some recurring patterns, providing you with some sense of predictability and certainty, you’re faced with trying to figure out what is real and what is just pretend. Large furry figures loom over you, and frighten you as they seem like monsters and might be dangerous but then you are told they are just people dressed up in costumes and you should find them fun! Your imagination really starts to kick in and you start to imagine shadows you can see out of the corner of your eye are coming to get you! Then you get so mad when someone tells you “no” when you really, really want something that you hate the ‘no sayer’, only to then feel scared that your hate might make them leave you all alone forever, because you haven’t quite figured out yet that your thoughts and feelings don’t magically make stuff happen.
Whew! And this is just the first couple of years!
As you get older, you may start being told you shouldn’t feel the way you do – “don’t be angry”, “don’t be scared”, “don’t be sad”, “don’t get so excited”… You also may receive messages that you should stand up for yourself but also do what you are told, that you should be kind and caring but not let others boss you around, that you need to be careful but you also need to be confident, and that you need to play on your own but you also need to play well with others, and so on…
How to help your child.
1. Provide predictability.
The more a child can predict what is going to happen, the more relaxed they will be. This includes consistent routines as well as consistent expectations. Being able to manage your own moods is also important for children as they are very responsive to nonverbal cues and likely to respond to your stress by becoming stressed themselves.
2. Read your child’s cues.
Even very young babies communicate their needs. For example, turning their head away when overstimulated. When their communicated needs are responded to, children (right from babyhood) learn that they can have some influence on the world and this gives them confidence in both their own abilities and trust in those around them to meet their needs.
3. Help your child make sense of their world.
The world is a strange and baffling place for babies and young children, and even older children and teenagers, in different ways. They need your help to work out what is going on.
For babies this might be as simple as interpreting their distress when they’re hungry – “oh, I see you’re hungry, let’s get you fed”, or more complex such as, “you feel sad when mummy goes away, mummy will be back soon.”
Later, a toddler may need help with managing their frustration when limits are placed on their behaviour, for example, “it’s annoying when we have to leave the swings isn’t it” or “to keep you safe you need to hold mummy’s hand while we cross the road.”
A child starting school may need information about what to expect, including a couple of school visits in order to become familiar with the new environment.
A school aged child may need help at some stage to understand and manage friend dynamics.
And teenagers will often need help with managing peer pressure and appropriate decision making.
4. Allow them to develop at their own pace and according to their own temperament.
All children have their own temperament and this needs to be particularly taken into account when it is notably different from your own. Many clashes that occur in families are related to differing temperaments and, therefore, different ways of experiencing the world.
For example, an extroverted parent may struggle with an introverted child’s need for alone time, while an introverted parent may struggle with the demands for interaction from an extroverted child. Some children are naturally more sensitive to stimulation from their environment than others and are more relaxed in a quieter environment. Other children need lots of stimulation and get bored very easily. Some children are more emotionally intense, while others are naturally very relaxed. Some children are very focused while others tend to move from one activity to another quickly.
Taking a child’s natural temperament into account allows for being more able to provide the kind of environment that your child will thrive in. This, of course, becomes a whole lot more complicated when you have children with vastly different temperaments in the same family!
In summary…
The most important thing you can do to help your child with inevitable stresses is to recognise that children do have things to get stressed about!
Often we look back on childhood with rose tinted glasses, as a time of no responsibilities and no worries.
While most children don’t have adult style concerns, I hope this brief article has given you a sense of the world from a child’s perspective, that, in fact, children have a lot of adjustments to make, and that these can be stressful at times.
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