Stress Relief for Kids

If a child in your care needed help with learning a new skill, like writing his or her name or counting to fifty, you’d be quick to provide assistance. If a child in your care has a physical need, you’re ready and waiting with the required help. How are you doing at teaching your kids to manage the stress in their lives?

A common answer to that question is “Stress? What stress? My kids have no stress in their lives!” True, children do not have stressors that most adults consider tough. They do not deal with job pressures, financial worries, or marriage maintenance. However, children DO carry enormous amounts of stress in their day to day lives of which most adults are unaware.

Children’s stress comes from the same types of mechanisms that cause adult stress, but are often not considered is problematic in the young person’s life. It’s just wrapped in different packages of details and is easily overlooked. Children feel stress from their home life. Obvious stressors are things like divorce, a family move, the loss of a pet, illness or injury of a family member, and so on. Others that are less often considered are arguing adults or siblings, overhearing/misunderstanding adult comments, minor illnesses, and reprimands. Very few homes are completely free of those!

Children also feel stress from social pressures at surprisingly young ages. Peer pressure, teasing, and isolation are all alive and well in the preschool and young elementary school. And more often than in the past, children lack the emotional and social support to handle stress in their lives. In many cases, extended families are far away, families do not form close connections with other families through church or other organizations, and even parents are less accessible to many children because of divorce, work commitments, and so forth. Children on their own emotionally are more susceptible to stress-related problems.

With any group of people, the amount of stress that is comfortable will vary dramatically among individuals and will fluctuate from time to time. How can you tell if your child is having trouble with stress? Sometimes they show the same symptoms as adults: complaints of headache, stomach ache, sleeplessness, or tiredness. However, because the child IS a child, these complaints can often be overlooked by the adults in charge. The comments are written off as “unimportant” and the kids are told to “find something else to do.”

If you are concerned, try keeping a journal of times and patterns when your child makes these statements. Kids (even highly verbal ones and even older ones) have a great deal of difficulty recognizing and verbalizing tension in themselves. They rely on adults to notice that “something” is wrong and help them isolate the source. Because of this lack of self-awareness, children are more likely to exhibit emotional or social symptoms such as isolation, tantrums, or whining. They may act out with others, have trouble making or keeping friends, be stubborn, show impatience, or have difficulty concentrating. These are easily passed off as “being naughty” and treated as behavior issues when they are really a sign that a child needs help with stress management.

Parents, care givers, and teachers can help children reduce their stress levels and learn simple management techniques. The first step is to learn to name and recognize tension. Young children (and even some older ones!) need to be taught the difference between tense and relaxed.

To help make the concept more clear to our youngest friends, try having the kids pretend to be wooden soldiers. Demonstrate how to march around the room with arms and legs stiff. Talk about making muscles stiff and hard. When they can walk like wooden soldiers, move the activity to the floor. Have everyone lay on their backs and make the same movements with their arms and legs. Finally, show them how to make their muscles tense and hard without moving anything. This feeling is called tension. Once kids can create tension on command and in selected parts of their bodies, they can also learn to relax on command. Children as young as three can learn to do these things!

Now, when you want the group to relax, or the child to get ready to sleep, you can guide him or her into relaxing muscles group by group. Start with the lower extremities and tell the kids to tense their feet, hold for ten to thirty seconds, then relax them. Move up the body, tensing and releasing each body part. Everyone will feel much more relaxed after completing this exercise.

There is another quick and easy exercise called “Palming” that young children can learn to do, as well. Try it yourself…you’ll find that it’s very soothing. Rub your hands together rapidly so that the palms get warm. Close your eyes and put the warm palms over your eyelids while breathing deeply. Quiet all of the words out of your mind while you enjoy the warmth. Give it a try! It feels absolutely wonderful!

You can also help the kids in your care to lower stress levels by improving their communication skills. Teach names for stressful feelings, openly talk about stressful situations, encourage expressive artwork, build self-esteem, and spend some time alone with each child. The time you spend on these simple activities will probably be less than what you would spend disciplining an unruly child and may even be more effective if the behaviors are stress-related. And of course, seek help from a medical professional for ongoing problems such as emotional distress, frequent illness, behavior problems, stomach pains, headaches, and so on.

Our kids need our help! We who pride ourselves on meeting their needs must learn to be sensitive to their stress levels and help them learn to manage stress. Try these simple tips with your kids this week, and be sure to take some time for your own stress management…you’ll be a better care giver if you do.