Stress in children | Integrated Learning Therapy

With thanks to Drs Yiming and Fung, authors of ‘Help your child to cope: Understanding childhood stress’

We all experience stress in varying amounts in our lifetimes. Adults under stress are advised to talk to others, get help in managing stress, increase physical activity to work it off and so on. Children don’t have as many options. They need the help of caring adults to cope.

Stress is reaction to a situation seen as being threatening and fearful. We react with a ‘fight or flight’ response which triggers an outpouring of adrenaline and cortisol. This results in changes to our physiology, including increased heartrate and breathing, more rapid blood circulation and the closing down of oxygen supply to various areas of the brain and body. In times of danger, we need oxygen to be sent to our muscles to help us flee or fight, so blood supply, with the oxygen it carries, is sent in less amounts to higher brain levels and other bodily systems. This is why young people so often experience a ‘blank’ in an exam situation. They simply don’t have enough oxygen in the higher brain areas to access the information learned and stored there. They also experience tummy aches, because their digestive systems stop working under stress.

What stresses children?

Stress is part of the daily life of all of us and is not limited to only a few really traumatic events. The same goes for children. They, like us, have to adjust to coping with all kinds of minor stressful events, such as missing a bus, failing a test, fighting with a friend and so on.

More serious, damaging stress can be caused by:

Family

Being rejected, neglected or treated badly by parents
Unbalanced parents (with mental conditions or personality disorders)
Marital disharmony and parents divorcing
Sibling rivalry and birth of a sibling
Death of parents and close relatives
Being hospitalized or having a parent hospitalized

School

Beginning pre- primary and high school
Bad relationship with a teacher
Frequent change of teachers
Poor discipline at school, leading to insecurity
High expectation from school
Homework overload
Learning difficulties
Tests and exams

Peers

Bad peer influences in the community
Rejection and non-acceptance by the peer group
Bullying and teasing
Highly competitive atmosphere in the classroom
Jealousy
Relationship conflicts with peers

The signs of stress

Children show stress in many different ways. Typically boys and girls may react differently. Boys tend to act out and become disruptive while girls become withdrawn and take refuge in daydreaming. These are, of course, generalisations but nevertheless it is worth keeping this in mind because boys’ behaviour will more readily lead to help being offered, while a girl under stress may go unnoticed.

Some of the many signs of stress may include emotional signs such as fear, anxiety, refusal to attend school, depression, anger, irritability and mood swings, loss of interest and lack of ability to get pleasure out of things.

Behavioural signs include aggression and violence, or withdrawal and quietness, destructiveness, hyperactivity, truancy, shoplifting, lying, hair-pulling, obsessiveness and compulsiveness.

Mentally, children may seem unable to think, concentrate or remember.

Physical signs of stress should also be noted. These include headaches, tummy aches, blinking of eyes, tics on face, neck and body, nausea and vomiting, a feeling of not being able to breathe, ringing in the ears, loss of appetite, frequent toilet visits and difficulties falling and staying asleep. Very often these symptoms result in visits to the doctor. No diagnosis of physical disease can be made so they may be dismissed as ‘naughty’ or ‘attention-seeking’ behaviours. Be aware that physical symptoms can have psychological causes and should be taken very seriously indeed.

How you can help your child

Recognise distress signals children send out
Avoid labelling children wrongly: realise distress signals can be misinterpreted
Remove the source of stress from children (or the child from the source of stress) if at all possible
Help children learn coping mechanisms (exercise, meditation, deep breathing)
Work on your parent-child relationship for child to feel supported and secure
Reach out to professionals about how to help your child
Call on relatives and teachers to help the child feel supported

Image supplied by Freepik

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.