At least 10 per cent of children in our primary schools today suffer from a diagnosable mental health disorder – that’s roughly three in every classroom.
These problems have many origins, but some are a direct manifestation of stress. And this is only the tip of the iceberg: many children who do not have a diagnosable mental disorder are also stressed
It was not always so. The evidence suggests that stress levels in the very young have risen sharply over recent decades, more than doubling since the 1980s.
This epidemic of stress matters. Some stress is, of course, healthy, even stimulating – a necessary part of normal life. But excessive stress of the kind too frequently found in our young today is damaging. It is noxious in itself, it undermines the ability to concentrate and learn, to play and to relate to others, form friendships; left unresolved such stress can undermine physical and mental health, both in the short-term and in the long-term.
Why are the young so stressed? What is it, in modern lifestyles, that puts such pressure on our children? Does the source of such pressure lie in school, or in the family?
Of course, starting school, going to school, learning to cope with new peers and new teachers, the changing demands that come with moving up from one class to another over the years are challenges that can create stress.
But these challenges are scarcely new: there is little to say, for example, that the classrooms and playgrounds of the 1980s were less stressful than those of today – yet children in that decade were far less likely to be overly stressed than they are today.
It is possible that the increasing emphasis on achievement and test results in our primary schools has created new pressures for the young. But the evidence suggests that children are entering school more stressed than in the past – well before such pressures could take effect. And in counterbalance to such pressures, schools today are more alert to children’s mental welfare than in the past, more competent in addressing problems as they arise.
Pressures on the family are also common causes of stress in childhood. Divorce rates are high, and such disruption of family life is indeed a serious stressor for the young. But this cannot explain the higher stress rates we see today.
Divorce rates were, if anything, higher in the 1980s than in the past decade – yet children were less stressed in that decade than now. Equally, economic pressures on families are often a source of stress in the young. But again, it seems unlikely that such pressures explain the greater stress levels in today’s children: as uncertain as our economic situation is today, it’s hard to argue that the 1980s were better: unemployment was higher, the economy more turbulent.
Many experts attribute the rises in childhood stress not so much to pressures on the family as to changes in the dynamics within healthy families, and particularly to changes in parenting since the 1980s.
Today’s parents micromanage their children’s lives as parents in the 1980s did not. They organise their children’s activities, programming every day. This is very likely a real source of rising stress: some children are simply being expected to do too much – and that in itself is stressful.
But such micro-management has other effects too. As a society we have lost sight of the benefits of idleness, of doing nothing – even of being bored. Empty afternoons were once the stimulus pushing the young to creativity, dreaming up games and activities.
And in playing their own games unsupervised, children in the past had opportunities for learning how to solve problems for themselves, and how to cope with the inevitable scrapes and stresses. Many children no longer have such spaces in their lives. Even when they play, it is increasingly in computer games structured by others, on an iPad, rather than in games led by their own imaginations. This passivity is surely affecting the ability of the young to learn to manage their own time, thoughts and emotions.
This problem is compounded by the fact that today’s parents are more risk-averse than those of the past, striving to keep their children safe from all dangers. They see threats where previous generations of parents did not (for example, “stranger danger”: no greater today than 40 years ago, but fear of it has ballooned, utterly changing children’s lives).
Such parental fears communicate to children, making the world seem more dangerous to the young. And at the same time, over-protection means that the young miss out on opportunities to learn to manage threats and anxieties for themselves. In sum, current parental practices have created a generation more sensitised to threat, and less capable of managing stress for themselves than was the case for children in the past.
Paradoxically for such an overprotective generation of parents, today’s children are also more likely to be exposed to worrying information than those of the past. They stay up later (the resulting loss of sleep is itself a source of stress: sleep deprivation affects hormones, raising the stress hormone cortisol, for example).
They are allowed to overhear the news – few parents today protect their children from current affairs as parents often did in the past (information technology has made it harder to do so now, though it wouldn’t be impossible). Young children are badly affected by reports of frightening things – terrorist attacks, for example. And here is another contributor to rising levels of childhood stress.
What if anything, can schools do to counter this tide of childhood stress?
Alert to individual needs
Even if a whole generation is stressed, individuals will differ both in why and how much they are stressed. Families are often not good at spotting or supporting the very stressed child (either because the whole family is stressed, or because they are the cause of the stress). The cornerstone of good practice in schools is a vigilance that can identify and provide support for stressed individuals before they are overwhelmed.
Talk about it
While some sources of stress are personal and best handled individually, others are more common and collective. The older the children, the more viable it is to directly discuss such stressors in the classroom: 10-year-olds are old enough to gain from discussing news reports of terror attacks or war, epidemics or natural disasters, sharing their natural anxieties and collaboratively putting their own risk in perspective.
Such discussion is seldom appropriate for very young children – and generally, their stressors are anyway more parochial. Stories can be very helpful here, allowing younger children to identify with protagonists facing difficult situations, and learning how they manage (examples of such stories include Dinosaurs Divorce (by Marc Brown and Laurie Krasny Brown) or Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (by Judith Viorst).
Foster strategies for coping with stress.
It is always tempting to step in and resolve problems for the young, and sometimes that is necessary. But it is vitally important for children to learn to cope for themselves, both with the problem and with the stress it causes. Empower them to have a go, with your support. It can also be useful to explore coping strategies through games of “let’s pretend”, or role-play.
- Dr Stephanie Thornton is a chartered psychologist and former lecturer in psychology and child development.