How Stress Affects Kids - and How to Help Them Cope

By Lisa Kosan

As parents, we may not think our kids experience stress - not really anyway. After all, we're the ones dealing with mortgages, threats of layoffs, orthodontist payments and global worries such as war and terrorism.

"Ask me," my 10-year-old son says. "I know all about stress."

So I ask.

"I get stressed when I have to do big projects for school," Max tells me, "or when I have math that's way too hard. Everything builds up and I can't get it done. I feel like I'm going to explode."

From preschool on up, children deal with their own significant sources of stress. There's internal stress - the kind that bubbles up from within - and external stress, the stress kids feel from family, peers and the world at large. There's the age-old childhood stressors of separating from parents at preschool, bullies, spelling tests, making the Little League team, a new crop of pimples, college applications, worrying about parents or friends, and more. Plus, today's rushed lifestyles, crowded schedules and increasingly high academic expectations have added new layers of stress to kids' lives.

So much so, in fact, that earlier this year the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) urged physicians to routinely assess young children for stress, anxiety and depression. The AAP acknowledged the deep toll of modern lifestyles and heavier academic loads on today's kids and strongly advocated for more downtime.

"When pediatricians are issuing a report saying that kids are too scheduled and stressed, and that they need free time, you know something is up," says Michael Thompson, Ph.D., author of The Pressured Child and co-author of the best-selling Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys.

Pressure to Succeed

One reason why today's kids are likely to be more stressed than even 10 years ago, many argue, is the sense of higher stakes for academic success in an increasingly competitive world economy. Parents may convey a heightened state of anxiety about this that children feel, either consciously or subconsciously.

"We have an idea that the best-raised children are the ones whose parents are guiding their child every second of the day," says Thompson, a clinical psychologist, consultant and parent of two teenagers. "Aware parenting is fine. But we're getting to a point of competitive parenting, when your children are a project that has to be constantly monitored so you can turn out the perfect child. You're under stress, and so are they."

Consider the mother of a little boy who told Thompson she wanted to hold her son back from kindergarten so that he could be at the top of the next year's class. She kept saying that she wanted him to be a leader.