The Stress of Childhood

                                     “I’m so busy.”   “I don’t have time.”  “I’m so stressed out.”

Unless you make intentional efforts to guard your time, these mantras seem to be the bane of our modern life existence.  We allow stress to follow us wherever we go and, by so doing, allow it to impact our health, our relationships, and our peace of mind. 

Mayo Clinic’s Effects of Stress on Health

Physical Effects	Emotional Effects	Behavioral Effects
Headaches Muscle tension Stomach aches Insomnia High blood pressure Diabetes Obesity	Decreased Productivity Decreased motivation Depression Anxiety Irritability	Over or under eating Anger outbursts Substance Abuse Social Isolation

Without a doubt stress impacts our lives, but do you realize how much stress impacts the lives of our children?   Children are in a crucible of developmental tension.  What seems trivial or like simple play is really a method of learning about the world around them and establishing their own sense of self.  At each developmental stage (Erickson, E.H., Childhood and Society, 1985), the child ultimately chooses between two world views and establishes how they will relate to adjusts to people and society. This is the normal work of a child and can be stressful in and of itself without the added stress imposed on them by adults:

What is normal stress for a child?

• Seeing parents leave and come back (trust vs. mistrust)
• Learning to share and not always getting what they want (initiative vs. guilt)
• Trying something new until they succeed (autonomy vs. shame and doubt)
•  Interacting with new environments (industry vs. inferiority)
• Evaluating belief systems (identity vs. identity diffusion)
• Forming friendships, experiencing loss, comparing and competing with peers
• Standing up for themselves, people they love, and values they believe in

  These issues are tough and ones adults continue to perfect their grasp on throughout a lifetime. Children are accomplishing this huge stressful task of developing their own sense of self and view of the world.  In addition, they must manage the intense stress of divorce, poverty, nutritional depletion, domestic violence, substance abuse, abuse and neglect, internet predators, school shootings, racism, and more.  Children are onslaught with adult issues without the maturity necessary to process or cope in a healthy way.

All this to say, children are doing critical and difficult emotional work on a daily basis.  They need adults to help them manage this stress instead of adding to it.  As adults, it is our job to:

1. Care for yourself (alone time, date nights, time with friends,  doing something you enjoy, explore your spirituality) 
2. Take responsibility for the adult issues in your life (Don’t blame others, Don’t rely on your child as a confidante)
3. Teach and demonstrate healthy coping mechanisms (positive ways of dealing with negative emotions)
4.  Explain why things happen (link cause and effect and avoid your child seeing themselves as the cause)
5.  Listen to your child without judgment or comment (don’t interrupt!)
6. Establish routines that your child can depend on (meals, bed times, etc)
7. Limit extracurricular  activities
8. Prepare healthy meals and snacks
9. Plan family activities
10. Exercise

 “Appreciating each other is a true family value, one that will bail out much of the stress on the planet and help strengthen the universal bond all people have.” – Sara Paddison

Song of Solomon

In Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison's character Pilate recalls an unsual incident from her past.  Pilate, employed as a housekeeper, is washing dishes when her employer enters the house.  The man is shaking and frightened, convinced he is standing on the edge of a cliff.  Standing in the middle of the kitchen, the man is terrified that he is about to fall off the edge of the cliff and plummet to his death.  Pilate, in an act of creative wisdom, walks behind her employer and grabs him around his waist to prevent his falling.  Pilate holds the man there in the center of the kitchen, soothing his fear of falling off the cliff.  While they are standing in this position, the wife enters the house and is immediately suspicious of Pilate's activities with her husband.  Pilate explains that she is keeping him from falling off a cliff.  The wife demands Pilate release her husband.  Obedient to her employer, Pilate let's go and the man immediately falls face down on the floor dead.

The symbolism of Pilate's intervention parallels to the way foster parents use their creative wisdom to help children.  Children come into foster care in crisis, experiencing trauma from varying types of abuse and neglect.  The trauma is often so severe that a smell, a fabric pattern, a room, a tone of voice, can trigger  a child back to the circumstances of their abuse.  To the outside observer, the child is not experiencing anything abnormal, but in the mind of the child the trauma is happening all over again.  The experience is just as real to the child as it was the first time and we have to respond accordingly.

As professional parents, it is critical for foster parents to make their home safe.  Just like Pilate, foster parents need to provide safety to a person who is experiencing an unobserved trauma.  Safety can be established with appropriate boundaries surrounding routine times, times that to many families are not threatening: bath time,  bedtime, travel time in the car.  Often, this need for safety must result in parental creativity.  What do you do when a child will not sleep in his bed at night?  What do you do when a child refuses to take a bath?  What do you do when a child hoards food and sneaks food into their room?  How do you show a child affection when they refuse to be touched?

Foster parents working together with each other and supervisors generate some of the most creative and sensitive ideas to respond to a child in crisis.  One foster parent told a story of a child who refused to sleep in the bed provided for her.  No matter what the parent did, the child slept in the closet.  The child shared that, when she was at home,  her mother kept her safe at night by hiding her in the closet.  Instead of forcing the child to sleep in bed, the foster parent made a comfortable pallet in the closet and decorated the walls.  The foster parent abandoned her own need to be seen as the perfect parent, with a home where children sleep in beds, for the higher priority of meeting the child's needs to feel safe.  The same foster parent was caring for several abused children.  Because so much of their abuse had occurred at bath time, the children would not get in the bath tub and would not allow themselves to be touched.  Weighing the costs of cleanliness and safety, this foster mother came up with an idea.  The solution?  Set up a kiddie pool in the kitchen and let the children put on their bathing suits and play in soapy water.

We must engage children in creative responses to their fears and traumas.  We must maintain both physical and emotional safety in the home.  When we move beyond our natural responses, when we overcome our own pride, when we acknowledge a child's experience as real, when we help them overcome their fear and meet their need for safety, this is creative parenting.