5 Tips To Help Your Child Cope With Stress From School by Katherine Rundell

School might be a distant memory for you but for your child it can be an ever-present source of worry. As social and academic pressures compound, school can be a hard environment for young people and the challenges that technology and social media, particularly with navigating this new home schooling world, place on your children are a new source of anxiety for them. Fortunately, stress can be handled with a few exercises and strategies. Help your child handle stress at school with these top tips.

1) Introduce Quick Calming Strategies

When stress starts to build up in children it can very quickly become uncontainable and bubble over. Kids have poorer emotional regulation than adults - this is a skill that needs to develop rather than an inherent ability.

Teaching your child some quick calming strategies will give them the ability to intervene in rising stress levels and recover their composure. These can be simple visualization strategies such as imagining a favourite place - teach them to take a moment, close their eyes and picture a designated location that induces feelings of peace, calm and warmth in them.

Even basic breathing strategies can be incredibly effective at reducing stress at a moment’s notice. Encourage them to place a hand on their stomach and feel it rise and fall as they breath deeply. A few deep breaths will ease stress in an instant.

2) Learn To Talk About Stress

Stress thrives in the darkness. Starting a dialogue about stress brings it out into the light and enables kids to talk about what they’re going through - this can have a transformative effect on their ability to cope with stress as sometimes lacking the language to express what they’re feeling can compound stress and frustration.

“Kids are sometimes reluctant to open up about their emotions so finding ways to broach these topics is essential,” says Victor Luttrell, educator at Revieweal. “If your child is reticent, sometimes starting a dialogue whilst driving, where face to face contact is diverted by attention to the road, can make it easier for them to open up.” Find a space where your child feels comfortable without feeling a spotlight upon them and they’ll begin to share.

3) Introduce Distractions

Sometimes the best cure for stress is a distraction that breaks the tension and allows for your child to reset their emotional baseline. When external forces bring about stress in a child, such as an upheaval like moving house or schools, or having to deal with the change in environment and learning that home schooling has brought, that stress will be hard to reduce in the short term. In these moments, a distraction can provide welcome relief for your child.

An effective distraction can be as simple as cracking a joke. Laughter is, after all, the best medicine and humor splits tension open like cracking an egg. Even in the most serious situations, a little bit of silliness can offer great relief for your child.

For a more substantial distraction, discovering new activities which divert them from their feelings can be a great help. Whether this is physical activities such as team sports or finding opportunities to volunteer, being active is often a solution to stress.

4) Put Limits On Technology

Whilst technology often offers a distraction or escape from the world, it can also reinforce negative stereotypes and create space for nagging feelings to eat away at a child. Whether it’s social media putting pressure on children to conform in certain ways or just TV and gaming, an overdose of technology can often compound a stressful period for a child. 

“Limiting a child’s use of technology often provides an opportunity to explore what nature has to offer,” says Rose Duerr, health writer at Essay Services. “This gives it a dual value in combating stress in a child.”

5) Find Positivity In Language

Something as simple as sentence structure can reinforce positivity and relieve stress in your child. Try to construct your requests in a positive way such as “Can we do more…” rather than the negative of “Don’t do such and such…” If you notice your child has a propensity to use negative language about themselves, such as criticising their ability or appearance, try to intervene in these exclamations to build a positive environment.

Children’s lives can be extraordinarily stressful as they feel a lack of agency and the pressures of schoolwork and social conformity building on them. Offer your child support and help them handle their school stress with these tips and they’ll begin to thrive.

Katherine Rundell is a school writer at Essay Writing Services services. She trained as a psychologist and has worked as a counsellor across elementary and middle schools in the Midwest since the late ‘90s.