Children and Stress

Children and Stress: Resilience in children

Children and stress. In the 2017 September issue of the Monitor on Psychology, Kirsten Weir examines the research on what fosters resilience in children.

While resilience may be due, in part, to one’s ability to regulate emotion, exercise self-control and call upon motivation to thrive, it is clear from a multitude of studies, that the most important determinant of resilience is a child’s relationship with his or her primary caregiver.

In other words, if a child has a secure attachment to the primary caregiver (a consistent and trusting experience with the mother, but sometimes the father, and, in some cases, an older sibling), the relationship’s reliability and nurturance can help protect the child against adverse effects of stress.

It makes sense. If we can rely on a stable environment and feel emotionally protected, we are going to feel safer and less stressed amidst a crisis. We are more likely to exercise optimism and make healthy decisions despite stressors.

What is most noteworthy about the importance of healthy parent-child relationships and resilience is that the child’s brain has a better chance of developing normally. As a result, if the child’s brain develops normally, it is capable of regulating emotion, cognition, and behavior. The regulated brain is going to be more capable of handling stress. It will be more likely to make sound decisions. It will signal behavior that recruits help when needed, allowing access to external resources.

Children and Stress: Secure attachment and resilience

While attachment researchers make a strong case for the relationship between secure attachment and resilience, it turns out, one’s relationship with his or her primary caregiver may not be enough to thrive in life these days.

Suniya Luthar, PhD, a research scientist and psychology professor at Arizona State University, reported surprising findings in 2017. In two of her articles, “Adolescents from Upper Middle Class Communities: Substance Misuse and Addiction Across Early Adulthood” and “Youth in High-Achieving Schools: Challenges to Mental Health and Direction for Evidence-Based Interventions,”

Luthar et al. report on the fact that youth in upper-middle-class families are one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half times more like to suffer from anxiety, depression, and substance abuse issues than the national normative sample of youth! These findings are contrary to popular belief that upper-middle-class kids are more protected against mental health and substance use issues because of the financial and educational opportunities they have.

Particularly interesting is that Luthar does not attribute these upper-middle-class problems to insecure attachment to caregivers. Nor does she attribute the problem to poor relationships with school administration and faculty. Instead, she blames these skyrocketing rates of mental instability and substance abuse to our culture in the United States. Specifically, she talks about how “more is better” in the United States—how there is constant pressure to make a lot of money and have a lot of material things and get a lot of accolades for one’s achievements.

Children and Stress: Self-worth

“You see, if your sense of self-worth gets tied into how much you can accomplish…two things happen. One is, if you don’t accomplish, you feel small, inadequate, lousy. The other is, you live in a state of fear of not achieving….

If I can tell myself I’m a good person because I’m a good mother, a good friend, that’s one thing. If I tell myself I’m a good person to the degree that I get that next grant or I get famous or I get these accolades, I’m living in fear.

These are things that are not as much in my control as are things like being a good mother or being a good friend. So, living in this constant state of tension and fear—if I don’t achieve, who will I be?—is something that puts us in a state of anxiety…and a state of depression,” reports Luthar to APA’s Audrey Hamilton.

Self-Medication

Luthar goes on to explain that both kids and parents subsequently learn to self-medicate the anxiety and depression through drugs and alcohol. For example, parents are caught in the pressure that their children have to compete mightily to get into a good college.

Many parents are heavily focused on their children’s grades and extra-curricular achievements. Being a mother of two adolescents who attend an upper-middle-class school, I know this well. At present, my older son is in the process of looking at colleges.

Perhaps it’s like an infection run amok. It starts with the unconscious identification we have as Americans that we are the greatest, most powerful nation on earth. The bigger is better concept gets played out in the media and in advertising, bleeds into the minds of parents, schools, kids, and, before you know it, we are all caught up in a vicious cycle—a Race to Nowhere as Vicki Abeles’s aptly titled documentary illustrates (Abeles 2010).

Race to Nowhere supports Luthar’s research. Through interviews with kids, parents, school administrators, and faculty, the filmmakers try to make sense of why our youth are so stressed out despite the fact that many of these kids appear to come from loving, stable households. Kids are subject to the “rubric” and the worry about not getting into a decent college.

Pressure

They are over-scheduled and over-focused on grades. Some even commit suicide because they fear they aren’t good enough. Indeed, when I asked my fourteen-year-old and his friends what stresses them out the most, they all responded similarly: “pressure to do well in school,” “getting good grades so I can get a good job,” “making sure I get all my homework done so my parents don’t get mad.”

Children and Stress: Conclusion

As parents we have a responsibility not only to try to facilitate a secure attachment for our children, but to calm the storm they are inevitably caught in give our culture’s current pressures. Staying rooted in what is healthy and resisting the pull of the masses (i.e., the pressure to make your child a superstar so he or she can achieve great things) is what secure attachment looks like.

If we, as parents, can maintain a sense that everything’s going to be okay, despite cultural anxiety, we are doing a service to our children.