School Stress: What Parents Can do

School Stress

Firstly, Stress is a general term that defines the load or weight that bears down on a system. For our kids, School Stress is the actual load of school based tasks, people and mental activity that builds up in their mind and subsequently body and behaviour. 

When stress is perceived as short term (minutes to hours), manageable, controllable or necessary, then the system can make adjustments to work with the load. 

In the first phase of the stress response, the brain produces necessary stress hormones 

to produce an effective motivational or readiness stance that improves performance. 

 

There is a small sweet spot (stress for a short time) that produces the desired amount of productivity. After that point (inverted U effect), performance quickly deteriorates and toxic levels of stress hormones build up in the body.  

 

(see for more neuroscience on stress… https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response)

 

In school kids, stress looks like:

1. Emotion dysregulation (easily angered, crying, frowning/grimacing) moving their body around a lot, 
2. Avoidance of school work with music, internet, gaming, socialising (or any other attempt at having fun), 
3. Attention problems: staring into space or zoning out, 
4. Defeat behaviours such as giving up e.g. “who cares”
5. Defiance / “Taking a Stand” behaviours such as being argumentative, refusal on other activities (“NO” for every request), procrastination, sneaking or lying.

Common factors that cause stress in school: 1) Academic demands, 2) lack of organisation, 3) social difficulties, 4) lack of support, 5) not enough down time 6) poor sleep.

 

What can parents do?

 

Are you a healthy support or an added stress? Check the behaviour and messages you give to your child. Is the first question of the evening how they did on a test? Is it about their general feelings and needs? Does your child talk to you? Often this can be a sign that you may be out of tune with your child’s needs. Children naturally want to share with their parents, however if they detect that their parents are invested in another expectation, then they will avoid the threat of failure and avoid talking.

How do you feel about their academic/sport/social performance? If you detect stress or concern about your child, then you are inadvertently conveying that stress to your child. This isn’t to say you should stop caring, but you should be aware that this will come across to your child. Children are excellent emotion detectors. You can’t hide, so have an open honest heartfelt discussion with your child about your feelings. 

Parents think positively! What is your positive plan B if your child doesn’t reach the academic, sport or social expectation? What other options do they have? How will you cope with that? Children are systems in-growth. That means how they are today, are only half of what they will be when they are developed. Often parents fear that their child will be stuck in the failures of the 6th class. However we all know that there are further growth opportunities to develop their skills. Our job as parents is to detect opportunities for growth and learning by being in-tune with your child’s development of those skills. Improvement from year to year is progress. Identify alternative paths to their goals and dreams. There are many roads to Rome. Create a flow chart of how to get to where they want to be, with detours if needed. Resist the urge to focus on whether they achieve the grade necessary for a good secondary school entry. This creates expectations. Expectation creates further stress. 

 

Children think positively!

1. First children need to identify their own negative or stressful thinking. A list of unhelpful thinking patterns (and alternative positive thoughts) is on this website here: 
2. Approaching your child’s avoidance behaviour is a good starting point to developing positive thinking. Ask them, how can we think about this instead?
3. Come up with a plan instead of leaving things to the last minute. Little bits every day. Focus on the plan rather than the expectation of getting a result, thus rewarding the effort, and not the outcome. 
4. Breaking down the mountain into smaller steps: Let’s work on the first learning goal for the exam. Let’s write the first paragraph. 
5. Use we/us/together language. The developing brain works best in connection with another open and receptive brain (yours!). Use your language to communicate that point to your child. They are not alone in their school tasks and together you’ll be able to get through anything. 

 

Work with your child’s strengths. 

What are your child’s strengths? Time and time again, parents focus on areas of weakness and try to improve this area with extra coaching, pushing, tuition and longer preparation. While this can be fruitful (and only when supplemented with a compassionate approach), it is much more effort to obtain a slight increase in improvement compared to when you invest the same amount of effort into the child’s strength. 

E.g. 30 minutes of preparation on a topic of strength will result in a much higher performance, compared to 30 minutes of preparation on a topic of weakness. 

Set realistic goals and place limits on the amount of time spent on an area of weakness.

 

Get on their level, spend quality time with your child. Kids need your kind, fun and loving attention more than anything. As children grow older this unstructured time with parents is needed more and more (rather than the opposite!) and their need for this attention actually peaks with adolescents. So often psychologists hear of parents feeling helplessly detached from their teen, as societal beliefs reward independence and success of tasks and achievements, hence further distancing their children from the loving relationship of their parents.

1. Seek them out, rather than calling them to come to you. Go to their room, join them in an activity that they initiate (not one that you initiate).
2. Limit their extra-curricular activities: children are often over scheduled and have no time for what’s important. How much more important is that extra sport or musical instrument compared to time with their family?
3. For teenagers, friends become an important part of their development, but can cause somewhat of a divide with their family life. You can bridge that divide and create a supportive role when you integrate your child’s friends into your family life. E.g. invite them for a meal or afternoon tea after a soccer match, or bake cookies together. Note, the activity should be outside of the teen’s bedroom (or at least most of the time) and needs to be in a shared space of the house. Hence meals are a great activity. In this way you will learn more about how your child is interacting socially, as well as developing trust with you. Your teen will be more ready to identify potential issues about their friendship when you’ve already gotten to know their friend. Key point: your job is not to befriend your teen’s friend, but to be a supportive and silent observer.   
4. Cuddles at night. We all need physical contact especially children, and the busy school/work routine can rob us of those down times. Hence the night time/bed routine is a good opportunity to snuggle in (on the couch or bed) and spend quality time with your child. A 20 second hug is all it takes to release a surge of oxytocin, the attachment binding hormone. Throw in a couple of I love you’s and specific compliments from the day, and the stress dissolves quickly out of their system.  

 

Prioritising Sleep, Diet, Exercise, Socialising, Nature

Avoidance behaviour not only sabotages school stress, but prevents other healthy behaviours. One big culprit for maintaining avoidance behaviours is the availability of the internet, social media, gaming and electronic devices in general. This very tempting and addictive behaviour robs us and our children of the essential elements of wellbeing: sleep, regular healthy eating, exercise, socialising and getting out into nature. 

Limiting device time is essential. This needs to be done in collaboration with your child. What do they think is healthy use? How much time do they have after all the wellbeing behaviours and school tasks are achieved for the day? Helping them to reflect on their pre-occupation of device use and the impact that this may have. What are their opinions when they witness other children using devices at dinner, whilst riding their bike etc.

Monitor your own device use! Often we have double standards, preaching to our children about their screen use, whilst not keeping our own in check. Devices and apps are designed for dependency and high use, hence the economic success of the product. We are all tempted by their allure. 

A good structure for ALL members of the family to maintain is:

Agreed device use time

Charging of devices in a shared area (not in bedrooms)

Usage of devices to be monitored (e.g. Microsoft Family Account, Apple Parental Control, Android Family Link)

App Timers – become notified when you’ve used an app for longer than you intended

 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-limit-your-screen-time-with-these-iphone-and-android-wellness-settings/

Instructions on restricting Youtube Content can be found here: https://nuedusec.com/parental-control-on-youtube.php