Image description: A child looks onward while scratching their head.

One of the most challenging things to navigate as a parent is teaching your child how to manage stress.

Stress can come in all sorts of forms and circumstances. Stress can be an acute thing, like not getting a result you wanted, getting injured or in put in harm’s way, or worrying about an upcoming test or exam. Some stress can be chronic, such as living in a dysfunctional home, coping with bullying at school for months, or deeper, more complex traumas that last in hearts and minds for years.

Since we are often attempting to manage our own stress in our day to day living, teaching children healthy coping strategies can help cultivate habits that will benefit them as adults.

Recognizing Stress

The first thing to recognize is that not all children can effectively communicate when they are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, verbally or otherwise. Instead these feelings can manifest like tantrums, outbursts, raised voices, stimming such as scratching and skin picking, or other outlets for self-regulation. It’s important for parents and grownups, with fully developed pre-frontal cortexes, to try and not take these challenging behaviors personally!

When you sense your child feeling stressed or overwhelmed there are a variety of things you can do to assist your child. Parenting coach and Occupational Therapist, Dr. Brooke Weinstein, states “the idea behind emotional regulation is not to suppress or deny emotions but to manage them consciously as they shape our words and actions.” Keeping this in mind, here are some tips to help your child manage stress in healthy and successful ways.

Name it to Tame it

Image description: A row of eggs with different facial expressions drawn on their shells.

One of the difficulties with teaching and recognizing feelings is that they are internal and abstract.

It is important to begin naming these feelings with your child, whether or not they are experiencing them in the moment, so that they will be able to identify these feelings in the future. You can even create social stories and other resources around the experiences that can cause your child’s unique feelings and encounters with stress.

Stress has all sorts of accompanying good and bad feelings, whether it is fear and overwhelm, or even the 'positive’ stressors like waiting for exciting things to happen like a friend’s birthday party or a family reunion.

Img description: A series of fruits and vegetables with cartoon faces depicting different emotions.

Using words like angry, frustrated, disappointed, and upset, can help them define their feelings and seek the root cause of those feelings.

Often times, simply having a conversation with a loving adult who is willing to listen can help diffuse these big feelings by allowing them to feel seen and heard.

One popular tool we use in coaching the recognizing of emotions is flashcards. The images on the right are an example of flashcards with a little more complexity than simple happy/sad/mad faces and engaging for all age groups.

Be Creative

Image description: A child examines a drawing depicting various color combinations in an art classroom.

When talking or writing it out isn’t in the cards, or isn’t how your child wants to regulate their stress, creativity can both regulate and help tell a story—if drawing or depicting the stressor is what your child might want to do.

Some examples:

Drawing
Painting
Coloring in a coloring book
Building a fort
Designing outfits and storylines for themselves or for a doll or original character/imaginary friend
Cooking and baking
Scribbling outside with chalk
Tie dyeing old clothes
Squishing and shaping dough or slime

Channeling our stressors into creative efforts can help their developing brains find refuge by utilizing these creative channels. Check out Art for Kids Hub on Youtube for guided drawing practices to get started.

Keep in mind that the goal is the process, not the finished product.

Get Moving

Image description: A child gardening outside.

Bodily movement is an underrated coping mechanism that is underutilized by children. Children were not meant to sit still all day every day, and need more than recess breaks in a school day.

Enrolling your child in a physical activity program or team is not necessary—dance parties in the living room, running around the block, or playing at the park can help children feel the physical release of stress and will help them be more in tune with the unique relationship between their bodies and their feelings.

Some examples to get you started:

A brief walk, bike, or rollerskate outside
Climbing trees (with supervision!)
Go swimming
Doing yoga, dance, or a ‘run’ with a Youtube video
A slower, but still physical, activity such as gardening, shoveling, or moving heavy objects in the garage
Create an obstacle course in your backyard/in the woods or a public park
Resistance bands, yoga balls and other home workout devices

Quality Time

Image description: Two kids work on a tabletop in a garage.

Having quality time with children can be challenging, especially for adults with multiple kids, jobs, meals to prepare, and extracurriculars to run to.

However, if you notice your child feeling particularly stressed and struggling to regulate themselves, see if they need some one on one time with you. This can be something as simple as a trip to the grocery store or going to watch a sporting event—or if your child has an interest like a television show or video game, to share and show you what they’re up to.

It may take time for children to open up, and sometimes, ‘opening up’ isn’t the goal.

If you’re working on something together like repairing an old car, the progress of repairing that car isn’t the goal either.

The time spent is what matters, no matter the result.

Words of Affirmation

Image description: A child cuddles with their parents in bed while staring at a tablet screen together.

Never underestimate the power of your words and the power of listening and being listened to. When children are experiencing stressful events and feelings for the first time, acknowledging, empathizing and putting those experiences into words can help make stressors more concrete—and one step closer to managing and taming.

If you find yourself stuck on what to say in these situations, here are a few examples:

“How can I help?”
“I am here for you”
“Let’s take a few deep breaths together”
“Let’s sit together until this passes”
“Would you like to sit with me?”
“I love you.”

You can also acknowledge and validate your child’s feelings in the moment without trying to remedy or relieve the stress they are feeling:

“Losing a game can be tough.”
“I’m so sorry that this is happening to you.”
“That sounds really hard.”
“I know you’re feeling upset, I would be too.”

Be clear when using your words, avoiding irony or rhetorical questions. Even with very young children, respect their feelings and avoid any ‘uptalk’ or ‘baby language’.

As grownups reading this blog, we’ve been through a lot—we’ve experienced, processed and catalogued all sorts of joys and hangups in our lives. But to a child, losing a game or losing a good friend can feel devastating.

Break The Cycle

Image description: A woman and a child walk together while holding hands.

There is a lot of discussion and depictions out there about Intergenerational Trauma—the ways in which we react and experience symptoms of trauma and stress that come from generations of family who live with us now, or have long passed on. How you cope with stress may be related to how your parents cope with stress, or how your parents’ parents reacted to their stress, and so on.

A number of children’s films—namely some of the latest debuted by Disney, Encanto and Turning Red—share these topics in safe settings for all ages. Here are ways you can recognize when Intergenerational Trauma is influencing your family’s stress:

Pressure to achieve a high grade, to make a parent or older adult proud (or relatedly, your child’s grades are slipping and there is withdrawal around the situation)
Fearfulness
Memory loss
Anger and irritability
Emotional numbing or depersonalization from an event that should be making a child stressed or uncomfortable
Lack of trust with others, not wanting to connect with others (peers or with parents)

There are many more signs and behaviors beyond this list—but in reviewing this list as a grownup, take some time to think about how your own parents treated you when things weren’t going your way—and if you are replicating the same disciplinary measures to your kids:

If you were told to stop crying when you feel sad, do you tell your children to stop feeling sad when they start crying?
If your parents yelled at you when they were upset, do you yell at your child when they’re making you upset?
If you were told to achieve a specific job title or other status, do you expect your child to follow in your footsteps? What if they fail to achieve something you achieved at their age?

Conclusion

We hope this was a good introduction to ways in which you can help your child cope with stress. Rather than dive into psychological and neurological factors of stress, these are general suggestions with activities you can try and ways to self-reflect. Managing stress is not a one size fits all approach, so take what resonates with your situation and leave what doesn’t!

More information:

Empathy Map - A resource used by Qi Creative to help others explore being in another’s shoes using various sensory approaches.