Children Stress Too!

The following is an article written by Stefanie Ilgenfritz with the Wall Street Journal on how children become stressed and that we may misinterpret their stress. It is very important to know how daily life can be stressful to our little one's.

Wall Street Journal Blog
I wrote recently about new research that showed how stressed out we are. But there’s more. Our kids are often stressed, too—and we don’t always see it.

One of the most striking findings in the American Psychological Association’s annual survey Stress in America was the mismatch between what kids say they are stressed about, and what parents think their kids are stressed about. We may assume that our kids are worried about peer pressure, but this research suggests that’s not as big an issue for kids as we think. For instance, among parents of 13- to 17-year-olds, 20% said peer relationships were a source of stress for their kids. But just 11% of the kids said they worried about that.

What are kids really stressed about? The future. A big worry was whether their family will have enough money. Among kids 8 to 17 years old, 30% said they worried about family finances—though just 18% of parents thought that their kids were stressed about financial difficulties. And 29% of teenagers said they were worried about getting into a good college or what to do after high school, while just 5% of teens’ parents thought their kids were stressed about that.

“Parents pretty predictably underreport” the amount of stress in their children, said Katherine Nordal, a psychologist and executive director for the APA’s practice directorate, at a briefing on the research last week. The results are worrisome: Parents significantly underreported how likely their kids were to have headaches, difficulty sleeping and eating issues, compared with what the kids themselves reported. The study, conducted for the APA by Harris Interactive, surveyed 1,206 young people ages 8-17.

Dr. Nordal noted that a significant percentage of kids say they are comfortable talking with their parents about what’s on their minds, so perhaps the problem is that (stressed) parents aren’t carving out the time to sit down with them.

We’d all like to believe that our kids are fine and that we are successfully protecting them from stress. But kids are no fools, and when they see us worry, they worry too. It’s hard to sit down with a kid—at almost any age—and talk about what’s bothering them. But this research suggests that we need to do a better job of listening to them.

Readers, do you think that your own stress spills over onto your children? Do you talk with your kids about what’s stressing them out? And what advice do you have for coping with stress in the family?

http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2009/11/09/what-are-your-kids-so-stressed-about/?KEYWORDS=%22stress+of+children%22