Yes — stress and anxiety are normal for kids
Stress… anxiety… They aren’t fun. We get that. But, in the right situations, stress and anxiety are good… for us and for our kids, according to a psychologist who has literally written a book on the subject.
Saying that stress and anxiety are… well, good sounds a bit like that line from the movie Wall Street — “Greed is good.” But Lisa Damour, author of Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls, says there is a huge chasm between the way psychology sees stress and anxiety… and the way general culture does.
The general culture sees stress and anxiety as something that is inherently bad, as something that needs to be avoided, that is harmful and that it needs to be prevented.
“You’re not supposed to feel that good that often,” Damour jokes.
Psychology sees stress and anxiety as normal, healthy functions. They are part of everyday life, Damour argues. “Stress occurs, whenever you operate at the edge of your capacity or whenever you are adapting to change,” Damour said speaking at the Parents Council of Washington’s fall speaker event held at the National Presbyterian School. And school is, by its very nature, a place where kids operate at the edge of their capacity. That is the purpose.
“In order to build intellectual capacity, you have to work at your edge, you have to grapple, you have to do things that are difficult and uncomfortable,” Damour said. So I try to get them to think about school as a very long — and at times extremely tedious — weightlifting program. We expect weightlifting to stress us, but the goal is clear: To become stronger.
What is important is that people, just as with weightlifting, have a chance to recover. And that recovery can take many different forms. For some, it is sports. To some it is music. To some, it is reading. Some cry in the shower. But each person needs to have recovery time.
Similarly, anxiety is a human being’s protective mechanism — it is our way of saying something isn’t right. “Everybody has anxiety. Just as, hopefully, everybody has a pain response. Your pain response alerts you when something’s amiss,” Damour said. “If you’re touching a burner, I hope you feel that and move your hand away. Anxiety is the emotional equivalent anxiety is our threat alert system. All of us come equipped with a system that says, something’s not right. Pay attention here. And that’s what anxiety is.”
And we’ve given anxiety such a bad name, kids try to eliminate it altogether. “When I hear about the raging, out-of-control parties, I always think, ‘OK, those kids are scared,” Damour said.
There is a line for anxiety can cross, she notes. “If they are preparing for tests with the idea that they should be in some Zen state, they will keep doing it until they get there,” she said, and most people are unlikely to ever get there.
Rather, we want them anxious when it is necessary, and to have the skills to be able to deal with it and understand it. We don’t want kids to think there is no anxiety about taking a test. That simply isn’t realistic, she argues. But rather we want healthy anxiety — on the 1–10 stress scale, we want it to be a level two or three, not a 13.
As parents, in part as of the belief that anxiety is bad, we tend to work to protect our kids from anxiety. This doesn’t work. To the contrary, it makes it worse later because they have don’t end up having the skills to deal with anxiety later on.
“Avoidance feeds anxiety, and contributes to full-blown phobias,” Damour said.
Instead, parents need to find ways to help kids deal with anxiety — and build on successes.
Other highlights:
- Sleep, sleep sleep: Sleep matters. “Sleep is the glue that holds human beings together. Sleep makes everything possible. When your kid is tired. He will be cranky brittle fragile. This is how human beings work,” she said. And none of us — children nor adults — deal with stress and anxiety without sleep.
- Technology — There are SO many discussions about kids and technology, with many people saying that technology is destroying kids. Quite simply, we just don’t have the data. “We do have evidence for raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record,” Damour notes. “They’re way better than we ever were — like less sex, less drugs,” pretty much less everything that suggests they are destroyed. And she also noted that technology is a conversation that you either leave at five-minutes or it swallows up 14 hours. The one thing we do know, she said, is that “sleep and technology are mortal enemies.” And, by and large, kids do not get enough sleep. (Elementary school kids need 11 hours of sleep; Middle schoolers — 10 hours; high schoolers need 9-hours. “I know they’re not getting it, but they can get closer. And this will go a far way to helping,” Damour notes. “Sleep is not a switch you can flip anymore it’s a ramp, you have to fall off. So your job is to get yourself on that ramp. 45 minutes to an hour before you want to go to sleep,” so turn off technology at least an hour before bed… and keep it out of the bedroom. (Yes, yours too!)
- Meltdowns — like a head full of glitter: Take a jar of glitter and shake it. That, Damour said, is the perfect metaphor of the neurology of the adolescent brain when they are in the midst of a meltdown. And there are psychological reasons for that — the panic part of the brain is more honed than the more reasoning part, but you have to let the glitter settle.
- Kids today work harder than we did — It is just true, Damour argues. Kids today have multiple advanced placement classes, hours of homework, and sometimes scores of extra activities. Every kid needs a work ethic, Damour said, but “as soon as they have that work ethic in place, you need to talk to them about being strategic.” The goal is to get the grade they want with the least work possible, which can feel like an anathema to many parents, but it is important for kids to survive.
- Focus on what matters — Again, there is a lot of talk about technology. The data doesn’t provide clear conclusions at the moment. “Let’s focus on the things that we know are absolutely essential for a healthy child development, and don’t let those get messed up by technology,” she said.
Resources:
Fact sheet handout from Dr. Lisa Damour at the Parents Council of Washington fall speaker series… via Dropbox (downloadable)… or via Scribd (below)
Lisa Damour on Twitter: @LDamour
Web site: DrLisaDamour.com
Damour’s book: Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls
Damour’s first book: Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood
Read more:
2018 PCW speaker: Lynn Lyons: Kids and anxiety — it’s about coping
