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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).


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