12 Mar Helping Kids Cope With Stress: Simple Ways Parents Can Build Resilience
Stress is part of growing up, but coping skills can be learned. Psychologist and Associate Professor Erica Frydenberg explains why supportive relationships, family routines and practical strategies can help children develop resilience and manage life’s everyday challenges.
Why this matters for parents today
From friendship worries to school pressures and the online world, children face many sources of stress as they grow up. Learning how to cope with challenges is one of the most important life skills parents can help their children develop.
“A child’s resilience is not pre-determined – coping skills can be taught.”
Teaching your child to cope
While there is no right or wrong way to cope, since the situation determines the best strategies that are available at the time, there are helpful and unhelpful ways to deal with the stresses of everyday life.
In particular, we know that people matter and that relationships and belonging are important protective factors that can help us cope with adversity. Having warm, secure relationships in childhood is a good predictor of close relationships in adulthood. This is not just about having good parent–child relationships, but also about having a good relationship with at least one sibling.
Mindset and a belief in your capacity to grow and change are also part of the coping process, as are grit and perseverance.
Research is also showing us where our institutions need to invest more effort in helping young people cope. Children from high-adversity backgrounds, for example, often struggle to learn from their mistakes. But using family-based interventions, neuroscience has shown that patterns of brain activity can change.
Other researchers have found that genetics matter, and that temperament in infancy is an important predictor of coping and adjustment in later years.
But a child’s resilience is not pre-determined – coping skills can be taught, and there are many factors that support their development. What was once considered to be intuitive learning through life experience can now be explicitly taught as coping skills, to equip young people for their social-emotional journey through life.
Here are a few areas families and schools can focus on.
In the family
Families play an important role in helping children learn coping skills and develop resilience.
- Advanced language and motor development skills are protective factors for children, so encourage language development in young children through activities such as conversations and word games. Motor skills can be developed through age-appropriate physical activities, including play and sport.
Better reading and problem-solving abilities are also protective factors. We know that reading to young children and encouraging reading-related activities, such as visiting libraries or gathering information, are helpful.
- Resilient boys tend to come from homes with structure and rules, so think about setting sensible, helpful rules for living together and communicating them, along with expectations, clearly.
- Resilient girls seem to emphasise independence and receive reliable support from caregivers, so consider offering opportunities for decision making and make it clear that support is available if required. Asking the question, “how can I/we help?” is one way of reassuring a child that support is available.
- The community also provides protective factors, including caring neighbours, mentors and youth leaders, so think about how your family can be involved in community activities like sporting and recreational pursuits that bring people together.
- Internet use can be addictive, and it can be a tool for cyber-bullying, an experience noted by almost half of the adolescent population. Young people need to be taught how to use it in a healthy way.
- Good parent–child relationships are critical, so being an available good listener is important. Consider how your family enjoys celebrations and having a family fun time. Remind each other of the events you have enjoyed together with photographs. Also, including family members in conversations when key decisions need to be made makes everyone feel valued and their opinions respected.
At school
Schools can also help children build coping skills as they grow.
- Young children, even pre-schoolers, can start to learn coping skills by talking about situations they encountered and how they coped and other ways they may cope in future.
- Ideally, young adolescents will be taught coping skills to equip them with a broad range of resources before the middle years of high school.
- Providing a booster in the latter stage of schooling in preparation for the more challenging and serious final examination period, and also for the successful transition to adulthood, is ideal. This could involve reviewing the helpful coping strategies that have been used to date and whether they are being used to deal with the challenges of the senior years of school. Time management and organisation skills become increasingly important at this age.
The rates of depression among young people are on the rise, most likely because of a range of reasons, including greater awareness of depression and the challenges of contemporary life.
It is difficult to predict what lies ahead from one year to the next. Nevertheless, becoming increasingly aware of your own coping capabilities, both personal and the resources that you can call on, is very reassuring.
Parent takeaway
Children aren’t born knowing how to deal with stress. Supportive relationships, open conversations and everyday family routines all help children develop the coping skills they will rely on throughout life.
The third edition of Professor Erica Frydenberg’s book, Adolescent Coping: Promoting Resilience and Wellbeing is out now, published by Routledge.
This article was first published in 2018 on Pursuit. Read the original article.
Subheadings and formatting have been added for readability.
