Is your child depressed? Anxiety filled? Afraid of going to school due to violence?
Helping Kids Cope with Anxiety
While it's important to protect and reassure our children in today's turbulent times, it's also important to focus on courage and understanding. If we completely shield our children from every challenging situation, they are likely to become more vulnerable to manipulation, fear and intimidation. Today, it's especially important to find a balance between protecting our children and teaching them to courageously and compassionately protect themselves and
others.
By nurturing courage and compassionate understanding in our children, we can give them the tools to put their hearts into action. Courage is not necessarily the absence of fear; it can be standing up to or facing our fear-even though we're frightened. Fear and anxiety are a normal part of life and are not always negative. Anxious or fearful feelings can warn children of real problems and help prevent them from making poor decisions. For example, "street smarts" can be a beneficial state of anxiety; when children activate their nervous systems to a higher level of attentiveness, it can keep them alert and safe from harm.
But anxiety and fear can also be extremely destructive if it escalates into intense terror and panic. Much more so than the actual events themselves, children's reactions to fear and anxiety will affect the quality of their lives, both emotionally and physically. Their response can lead to personal growth, or it can impair that emotional growth. When children respond to the emotions of fear and anxiety by become stressed, it can affect their ability to take effective action as well as to be happy and experience pleasure.
Courage is an important virtue which can help a child to attain a goal such as jumping off of a diving board. But when courage is combined with understanding it can enable children to do the right thing and take action in a situation. For instance, courage and compassion might motivate a child to tell a friend to stop teasing or playing too roughly with a puppy and it might inspire a teenager to come to the defense of a friend who is the victim of malicious gossip.
Confucius taught that to become a warrior one had to practice one essential rule, "As you wish others to treat you, so you must treat others." Kids need to learn that the golden rule means courageously putting your compassion into action. Genuine understanding and compassion is a wish for the well-being of other people and for every living being in the universe. It comes from a feeling of empathy-an ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and understand how they feel.
We cannot control all of the things that will happen in our children's lives. As parents, it takes a great deal of understanding and courage to realize that the best way to protect our children is to teach and allow them to protect themselves.
Read about how parents can help Raising Courageous, Compassionate Kids by Patti Teal, Child Development Specialist.
Coping with Fear of Violence when Returning to School
Parents and other
caring adults can help to reassure those children and reduce their fears.It is difficult to be reassuring when the adults
are also feeling afraid, though. It
might not be convincing to the children if the adults tell the children
that nothing bad will happen. Parents
who promise that nothing bad will happen also risk losing the children's
trust and making them feel betrayed when those children learn that the parents
cannot control all outcomes.
Adults can, however, reassure children that adults will
do everything they can to keep the children safe.
The adults can then describe the safety precautions they are taking.
This is honest and realistic, and often this is the reassurance that
children need.It also is appropriate to introduce religious
beliefs at times like this. Beliefs
about the meaning of life and death and about the presence of a higher being
may be more meaningful at times of trauma.
Children have other emotions
During times of trauma, children are often afraid, and
it is appropriate to deal with those fears.
Previous attempts to help children through times of trauma have often
stopped there, however. Studies of
children after the Persian Gulf War showed that children did have fears,
but those studies also revealed other responses.
After fears, the next most common reactions among a sample of children
at that time were sadness and anger. The
children were not only concerned about their own safety and well-being;
they were also sad that other people were being killed and that children
were losing parents. They were angry
that some people had decided to fight instead of working out their problems
(Myers-Walls 1991).
Adults should try to identify the feelings
of children that go beyond fear for their own safety.
Caring about the well-being of others is an important pro-social
emotion related to the development of nurturing behavior.Adults can build on that emotion by helping
children to explore ways that they can care for others.
It also is helpful if parents validate
a wide range of feelings in their children, including uncomfortable ones.Parents may wish they could protect their children
from fear, anger, and sadness, but such protection is both impossible and
not helpful. Children benefit from
learning that all emotions are legitimate and then learning positive ways
to express those feelings. Parents
who admit their own uncomfortable feelings can model for the children some
positive methods for coping with those feelings.
The better the parents learn to manage their own feelings, the better
the children will cope (Norris et al. 2001c).
Take action with children
People who feel helpless and out of control
will feel stress more acutely than those who have a sense of self-efficacy
(Norris et al. 2001c).After a stressful or traumatic event, it is
helpful for both parents and children to take some kind of action to help
to put their world back in order. For
younger children, this may mean acting out the traumatic events through
play and drawing pictures. For adolescents,
writing letters to the editor of the paper or collecting funds for people
in need may be helpful. Parents can
help to guide children to an action that is appropriate for the child, the
family's belief system, and the community.
It is important for parents to take action as
well.Children who see their parents take action are
likely to learn that there is hope and that it is possible to be optimistic
about the future. Hope and optimism
are powerful coping tools (Norris et al. 2001c).
Seeing parents take action can also increase children's feelings
of security and safety. In a practical
sense, parents and children who take action are also making future human-caused
traumas less likely.
Reduce violence in children's lives
Being victims of violence can increase a person's sensitivity to other violent
acts. Feelings of fear and threat impact
lower levels of the brain, and continued exposure to those emotions can change
the actual chemistry of the brain, making higher level thought less likely
and more difficult (Perry 1997). Continued
exposure to violence also carries the risk of re-traumatizing a child (Figley
2001).
Parents and teachers should monitor exposure
to media and limit continual repetitions of the traumatic event in sound
and pictures.They also should monitor play activities and
toys. Activities that may have felt
appropriate and neutral in the past may now be uncomfortable and stressful.Parents also should become aware of their own
use of violence when interacting with children.
Traumatized children will not benefit from harsh punishment.Harsh punishment also appeals to lower levels
of the brain. Both parents and children
will function better if they use reasoning, discussion, and problem-solving
in their interactions with each other.
this section was taken Talking to Children About Terrorism by
Judith A. Myers-Walls, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist,
Child Development and Family Studies, Purdue University.
Dealing with Teen Sadness and Depression
Sarah has never had much confidence.
High school is harder than she expected.
My husband and I are divorced, and
this has been very hard on her. Now,
she looks and acts absolutely exhausted,
doesn't sleep, and just sits in her room
crying with her door closed.
When she
goes out, she dresses all in black clothing
and wears heavy black eye shadow.
I have tried to talk to her, but she acts
angry and won't say a word to me. I
can't tell if Sarah is just "going through
a phase or is truly depressed.
The teen years offer new experiences and
challenges that can be exciting, but also
stressful. The stress of adolescence is one
of many factors that can make young people
unhappy. Teenagers are also experiencing
hormonal changes which can affect
their mood.
Some sadness and mood
swings are a normal part of life. But when
the "blues last for weeks, or interfere with
school, home, or other activities, your
teen may be suffering from clinical depression.
Depression, a mood disorder that is
a real medical illness, is often unrecognized,
but can be effectively treated.
When teens, or anyone, are very upset
about things, they need to talk with someone
who cares and can help.
Parents
should be concerned and talk with their
child about his or her unhappiness,
whether it is a temporary state or a case
of clinical depression. We should set an
example of confronting problems, head on.
It is sometimes hard to tell when teens
are depressed, because the symptoms may
be hard to read.
For example, you may
mistake a sleep disturbance, which can be
a sign of depression, for a late-night television
habit, or your teen may only reveal her sadness in writings
that contain morbid themes. Teens may say they are "bored
when, in fact, they are depressed.
In addition,
signs of depression may vary among
cultural groups: Teens in some groups experience
sadness or guilt; while others experience
more physical symptoms, such as
headaches and nervousness.
Clearly, Sarah is unhappy and may be
suffering from depression. What is going on
in her life to make her feel this way? Think
about past and present problems. When did
this crying begin? Did it coincide with family tension, or the divorce, or problems in
school? How is she getting along with
friends? How are things in your family, now?
Are there any other problems or symptoms?
The answers to these questions provide clues
about what is wrong and how to help her.
Depression does increase the risk of
suicidal behavior. Many teens think about
suicide, and some of them follow through.
Parents should be especially concerned and
get professional help immediately if additional
warning signs are evident, such as
when a child has a history of previous suicidal behavior,
hints at not being
around in the future, expresses a desire
to die, gives away prized possessions, has
experienced a recent loss, or makes
threats of suicide.
Sarah needs to talk
with someone who cares and can help.
Give her an opportunity to discuss her
feelings and what is causing them. If she
won't find an adult with whom she can talk, such as a family
physician or a mental health professional.
Read more about teens handling tough situations from the National Institute of Mental health.
Source: The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is the lead federal agency for research on mental disorders. NIMH is one of the 27 Institutes and Centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest biomedical research agency in the world. NIH is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).