The Importance of Stress in a Child’s Life: Helping Them Cope and Grow

You may have come across articles about creating a stress-free environment for your child, but there are also dozens of articles about its benefits in your child’s life. Which statement should you believe?

A stress-free childhood is a myth; this isn’t going to be like this for anyone and that’s okay. Although we usually see stress as something negative, ‘I’m so stressed at work’, it’s important that your child learns how to deal with it.

The effect of stress

Stress is part of development. If children don’t experience this, they don’t know how to deal with it. Many changes occur in life, many of which come with pressures and fears. If you keep shielding your child from this, he will not be able to deal with it if something happens that evokes strong feelings.

To deal with

It is important that your child knows ways to handle pressure. One of the most important factors in this is having people around him who can help him with the stress. As a parent, you can’t remove stress from your child’s life as you may have been able to with him as a baby, but you can help. You can already do that by letting your child understand why he is stressed and what he can do with those feelings.

Harmful stress

The stress only becomes harmful when a child is dealing with dysfunctional relationships. Children who experience abuse, trauma or neglect at the hands of a trusted caregiver face a more intense form of stress that can stay with them for a lifetime. Children affected by this can be helped if a genuinely concerned adult who can be trusted will help them.

Help grow

Positive relationships can help with the stress in your child’s life. What else can you do to help your child cope?

• Focus on something that can be controlled: if there is fear because of a difficult test, you cannot change anything about the test, but you can, for example, change how well you know the material. For example, you can help your child with learning.
• Support: many stressful situations are tolerable. You can get through them with the support of others. So you can offer your child positive support, for example by answering questions to help them understand the stressful situations.
• Pay attention to your own stress: if you are tight, your child will notice this and he can take over. In addition, you give him a good example when you have peace yourself and you take good care of yourself.

If your child is very scared.. You can do this to help your child