KID STRESS

No joke: Stress affects kids much more than adults may think.

In this article:
What parents can do to help
Children today have more to worry about

By Georgia Witkin, Ph.D.

nxiety attacks in 9-year-olds. Stress-related problems among a third of the under-13 set.
The sad but undeniable news is this: After plaguing adults for decades, stress has spread to kids.

Why are children under such stress? We can speculate about the causes - from the increase in stressed single-parent households to the disturbing amount of violence on TV. But the real experts are children themselves.

Children report the most stress when parents fight or lose control.

To find out what they say about stress, I polled more than 700 youngsters under 12 through the Prodigy computer service. More than 600 parents also responded to a companion survey asking them to guess what children would say. (Kids and parents not using computers were given the same questions; little or no difference was found between the groups.) According to the kids surveyed, their top stresses are:

1. School concerns. Kids worry about grades, tests, homework, flunking, project deadlines, final exams and teachers, in that order. Most parents mistakenly thought kids are most stressed about "friends not liking them" and "kids making fun of them" - in other words, peer pressures, which came in a distant third on children's stress list.
2. Worrying about family and parents - health, money, moods, marriages.
3. Peer pressures, such as bullies, gangs, popularity contests, fickle friends and teasing.
4. World concerns. Children say they are more angry about inequality, injustice and human cruelty than about personal problems such as their siblings' behavior, hurtful friends or parental rules. They say they worry about the world (safe air and water; nuclear war) almost four times more often than about crime.

Even more surprising than what perplexes children is how little their parents seem to know about their concerns. Surprisingly, the parents underestimate:

• How much children worry and feel alone.
  
• How much insomnia kids have when they're stressed.
  
• How often children are afraid to talk to them.
  
• School stress.
  
• How often children's fears are realistic.
  Perhaps the biggest wake-up call for parents is what kids say "scares" them. More than being home alone, more than the dark, more than a frightening movie, the kids in the poll tell us their parents' behavior is scary. Children report the most stress when parents fight, get angry or lose control, emotionally or physically.

  Parents missed many stress symptoms, too. They list stomachaches, headaches and insomnia as kids' stress symptoms, but generally miss nausea, shaky hands and lightheadedness.

  The majority of kids (65 percent) say they want to be alone when they're stressed, but only one in three parents knows it. Half the kids polled say they daydream a lot under stress, but only a quarter of parents know it.

  And almost 75 percent of the children say they have nightmares at least sometimes, while only 37 percent of parents know that.

  Bottom line: The overwhelming majority of children responding to the survey - 84 percent - say they worry, and almost a third say they worry "a lot."

  The good news is that with a little more adult attention to the problem, the stress level of most children can be dramatically reduced.

  Georgia Witkin, director of New York University's Mount Sinai Medical Center Stress Program, is the author of the new book KidStress: Effective Strategies Parents Can Teach Their Kids for School, Family, Peers, the World - and Everything (Viking, $23.95).

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  How parents can help

• Realize children have stress --sometimes significant - in their lives. It's natural. It's normal. Don't make light of it, punish yourself for it or think you should always do something to "make it go away."

• Don't assume that what stresses you will stress your child, or that your coping strategy will work for your youngster.

• Know your child. Notice what she does naturally to cope with stress. Some children use their imagination to escape from chaos; others get active or quiet.

• Help kids help themselves. With humor, sympathy and simple logic, get the dilemma down to child size. And encourage them, with your help at first, to find things they can do to make the stress more tolerable.

• Strike a balance. Give a child enough structure so he usually can predict what's coming next, and enough choices so he feels some personal power.

• Find the "good news." Supervise what they watch on TV, discuss news stories that may upset them and find the good behind the news to talk about, too. Do charity work as a family so they can feel less helpless when they hear about disasters.

• Don't be part of the problem. If you have a problem controlling your temper or moods, get help.

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  REALITY CHECK

  Children today have more to worry about

• By 2000, more than 50 percent of children will live in a single-parent household at some time, there will be more blended families (stepparents, stepsiblings) than traditional families (two biological parents living together), and half of reconstituted families will end in divorce, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

• Child abuse is now higher than it's been in the past 20 years. A University of New Hampshire study finds that 63 percent of American children are victims of their parents' verbal aggression, and the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 2.8 million children are victims of physical aggression or neglect. And, contrary to the stereotypes, studies show child abuse crosses all boundaries of age, race and social class.

• Exposure to violence also has increased. Children today see more than 30 dead bodies a week on TV news programs, thousands more in movies and an average of 30 acts of violence in a given half- hour of cartoons.
  By age 12, the average American child has witnessed more than 100,000 acts of TV violence, and a Stanford University study finds real-life violence seen on television news shows may have just as powerful an effect on young emotions as experiencing an actual terrifying incident themselves.
  Photo Credit: Donna Day