| The Stress Effect: Modeling serenity in a hurried world |
By: Tara J. DeRosa, Ph.D., Columnist, “A Child’s Internal World”
On 1/16/06
This morning I enjoyed a cup of herbal tea, meditated, admired my spotlessly clean home, and spent quality time creating an art project with my happy, relaxed clan. Just before 9 a.m., I cheerfully sent the family out the door and sat at my shining desk to write, as classical music played in the background.
| "The fact that you, the parent, enjoy spending time with your child with no apparent goal lets her know you find her more interesting than just about anything else in the world –" |
Then, my alarm went off and I awoke to real life – 60 yards of mud behind my house, work deadlines, an overworked spouse and a child who rewards my intense need for sleep by crawling into my bed in the middle of the night and planting his feet between my liver and spleen.
Stress – both the chronic, everyday, too-much-to-do in too-little-time kind, and the sudden good-God-the-hill-behind-the-house-is-seeping-into-the-foundation kind - is running rampant in my household these days. Not so coincidentally my family’s rhythm has suffered.
Daily routines, long ago ingrained, are suddenly a battle between child and parents; difficult behaviors, long since abandoned, are creeping in again; and when I think about my usually happy child the word “surly” leaps to mind.
Childhood stress has been getting a lot of attention these days; from the exposure to world events to the scourge of over-scheduled, pressured children. According to David Elkind’s The Hurried Child (2001), stressed-out children may experience recurring headaches, stomachaches or neck pain; increased irritability; trouble sleeping; lethargy or withdrawal; restlessness; regression; nervous habits; a “strained look”; and peer problems.
It is clear, that overstressing our kids is a phenomenon to be avoided. This begs the question, though, what do you do when you, as parent, are stressed? How do we reduce the impact of stress on our children while at the same time helping them manage what may be inevitable?
According to Drs. Donald Nathan and Marian Stuart of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, stress can be passed from one family member to another (C. Solimini, Stress is Contagious, Family Circle Magazine, February 12, 2002). Interestingly, the degree of stress experienced by a child has less to do with the situation itself than with the parent’s attitude. An overworked parent who complains endlessly and drives himself without a break is far more likely to communicate stress to his child than is the parent who acknowledges the difficulty of the current situation, schedules leisure time and takes active steps to manage the situation.
Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise, authors of The Over-Scheduled child: Avoiding the Hyper-parenting Trap assert that all children do better when they witness happy parents. Make your own happiness a goal – set aside time in your week to do things that make you feel good and talk about these things with your child. As a family, make sure you put as much effort into enjoying one another as you do accomplishing tasks. Some suggestions:
Go Outside:
There is something about fresh air – even when it is cold or wet – that is inherently relaxing. Unfortunately, we have managed to turn the pursuit of outdoor enjoyment into another opportunity to accomplish, consume and learn. Avoid spending hours researching outdoor gear and resist the urge to sign the family up for expert lessons. Grab some shoes, a coat and whatever else your particular climate dictates, and head out the door. Look at leaves, talk about the changing weather conditions, toss a ball. Then, once the fresh air and exercise has sufficiently worn out your kids, head home for some indoor cuddling and cocoa.
Institute some Techno-Free Time:
Remember all those devices that were supposed to make our lives easier? They didn’t. Turn off the phone, TV, e-mail, Palm, Blackberry, and whatever new gadget comes out before this column is released. Take some time each week to be unavailable. Leave the house (without portable communication devices or videogames) if you have to. We are so used to being in constant contact that even an hour away from the rest of the world can feel like a treat, both for you and for your kids.
Be Unproductive:
When you are spending time together as a family, shift the focus away from accomplishment. So often, our energies are on learning, creating, and doing. While productivity is both valued and valuable in the larger world, it is important that your children see their relationship with you as being about who you are as a family, rather than what you can do as individuals.
According to Rosenfeld and Wise, it’s “good for families to spend unproductive time together – shooting hoops, taking walks, playing games, sitting and talking, reading. The fact that you, the parent, enjoy spending time with your child with no apparent goal lets her know you find her more interesting than just about anything else in the world – nothing will bolster her self-esteem more effectively.”
Use Time to Create Meaning:
In a struggle to juggle everything, we all tend to find ourselves spending a great deal of time in activity that is neither useful nor relaxing. We enroll our children in soccer because everyone else does; we join the P.T.A. because we feel guilty saying “No.” What results is a level of over-extension that increases stress while robbing our lives of meaning. The end result is that our children see us trying to do everything while ultimately accomplishing nothing. The message we send is that responsible people run from sunup until way past sundown. Children internalize these messages and may begin to believe that they must engage in this high-stress life-style to please us. Scary, huh?
Stress, it seems, is here to stay. Like the futility of trying to organize an overstuffed closet, creative calendaring, better computers and multi-tasking only move stress from one place to another, not really solving the problem. Our job as parents is to provide a haven for our children, and the first step in doing so is to ensure that we create this haven for ourselves. Learning to live peacefully in a frenetic world may just be the greatest lesson you impart.
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