Stress — Is It In The Air?

I was talking to a counselor at a Seattle area high school last weekend. She told me that, while her school has seen a lot of problems go down over the past several years, like teen pregnancy and gang activity, they’ve seen a big rise in stress in the kids at school. Then, last week I spoke to an intake worker at a small psychotherapy clinic who said they had been seeing a big increase in calls from parents with very anxious kids. Some of these kids are as young as six or seven.

This really got me thinking. What is causing all this stress, especially in ones so young? Is it that the effects of the current recession have been weighing on them — either directly, such as when a parent loses a job or their home is  foreclosed on, or indirectly, from hearing about this kind of problem from friends or reading about it in the news? I’m sure the recession plays a part, but it can’t be everything since the people I talked to noticed this increase in stress and anxiety back during the economic boom years.

So is it hearing about all the natural disasters, like Haiti this year and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia? Or all the rancorous name-calling and blaming in the political sphere? Or the news of global warming and what it means for the future of the planet? It could be all of those things, but of course we’ve always had natural disasters, nasty political fighting and dire warnings that “the end is nigh,” although now we can hear and read about them around the clock, rather than just in the morning paper and on the six o’clock news.

Is it because school itself has become more stressful, with kids, parents and teachers realizing the importance of higher education and that it is increasingly difficult to get into top colleges and pushing the kids to succeed? Or because there is more standardized testing than ever before, with everything from school funding to personal labels (“top percentile,” “below average”) to graduation riding on them?

I’ve been thinking about all this a lot, but I haven’t any answers. I don’t know where all this stress comes from, and, while I’ve come across many theories, I haven’t found any definitive answers about its cause. I do know that the rise in stress and anxiety in kids has tracked the same rise in stress and anxiety in adults.

All I can suggest is that, until the “experts” figure out what is causing this explosion in stress and anxiety and fix it, it is up to everyone to do what they can to work through their own stress and bring it down to a manageable level. This is doubly important for parents. So let me give a pep talk to parents now.

Parents, the more you bring down your own stress, the less stress your kids will have. Parents always try to tell me that, no matter what is going on (money problems, fighting with in-laws, potential divorce), their kids don’t know what’s going on and so are protected from it. And the kids always tell me they know exactly what is going on. So Parents, just trying to shield your kids from the knowledge of what is happening won’t protect them. You actually have to get your own stress way down to make a less stressful home environment for them.

And, if you show your kids what you are doing to bring down your own stress (like exercising regularly, eating right, spending time with good friends, or getting enough sleep), you get the added benefit of teaching your kids how to manage their own stress, a skill they can use their whole lives.