5 Tips for Helping Your Kids Manage Stress

Stress is the short and long-term physical or mental response to an external cause. As life is full of changes and challenges, it is normal for everyone to feel stressed from time to time. Still, chronic stress can cause serious physical and mental health problems.

Especially for kids, dealing with stress for a long time can cause some dangerous health issues that may affect their long-term success in life.

Individuals experience and perceive stressful situations in various ways according to their personal traits, such as age, characteristics, and gender. Thus, stress response and coping skills can be different for kids when compared to adults.

In this blog, we want to help you out with this process by giving tips for helping kids manage stress. In the following sections, you will learn the signs, effects, and causes of stress and find useful stress management strategies.

How to Help Your Kid Dealing With Stress

Dealing with stress alone can be daunting for kids. Thus, parents and family members play a great role in helping kids while they are coping with stress. As a parent, you probably wonder how you can help your kid's stress management process to provide them with a healthier life.

Well, the first step to supporting your kids in this process is to observe them in stressful situations and try to understand their reactions. Then, you can adopt some habits to help them cope with stressful situations.

Before moving on to ways to improve stress management in kids, let's start with the basics and explain when and how children get stressed.

What Are the Signs of Stress for Kids?

Even though kids can react differently under tense situations, typically, kids show these common signs when they are stressed:

• Irritability and anger
• Behavioral changes
• Trouble sleeping
• Neglecting responsibilities
• Changes in eating habits
• Getting sick more often
• Mood swings
• Difficulty concentrating in school
• Low motivation

Why Is Stress Management Important for Kids?

Stress management is one of the most significant skills to gain for kids as it directly affects their academic life, as well as their physical and mental health. Kids with weak stress coping skills might underperform in school and be unmotivated towards learning.

Considering that tests and grades are one of the biggest stress factors for kids, it is true that kids need to be supported with fun and educational activities to overcome the effects of stress.

What Are the Effects of Stress on Kids?

As stress and health are directly related to each other, being in stressful situations can trigger changes in kids physically, mentally, and emotionally.

What Causes Stress for Your Kids?

Together with sudden and disruptive changes, kids also feel stressed when they have daily problems in their school and family lives. Typically, common stress sources for kids include:

• Worrying about school and grades
• Tension at home
• Having problems with friends, such as being bullied, having new friends or peer pressure
• Changing schools, moving, or dealing with housing problems
• Going through bodily changes
• Divorced parents or a problematic family member
• Disturbing world events like natural disasters, health crises, and violence

5 Tips to Help Your Kid Dealing with Stress

Facing stressful situations is a fact of life for children. Thus, as parents, the best way to help your kids manage stress is to teach them coping strategies to overcome high-pressure situations.

Luckily, there are a lot of stress management strategies for parents to teach their kids how to overcome stressful situations. These stress management strategies mostly include activities that will make kids feel healthier and happier. To be more precise, let’s explore these strategies with some useful tips.

1. Have Them Exercise to Overcome Effects of Stress

We all know that exercise is beneficial for both the body and mind. In fact, exercising has positive effects on kids’ confidence, self-esteem, cognitive skills, and ability to deal with stress.

Research shows that kids with higher levels of physical activity are also happier. So if you want to strengthen the stress management skills of your children, you can add fun gymnastics games, fitness activities, and exercises for kids to their daily routines.

Let Your Kids Talk It Out

Kids feel supported when they realize that they are listened to and understood. Especially in stressful situations, they might need a supportive and empathetic conversation with their parents or family members.

Oftentimes, it can be challenging for parents to have healthy conversations with their kids. In this situation, you can use these strategies to reduce the stress that your kid is experiencing:

• Tell them you are here to help and ask them about what is bothering them.
• Listen to their answers attentively and calmly.
• Comment briefly on their feelings without judging or blaming them.
• Ask them to name their feelings and emotions.

If you think that talking with your kid is not enough to help them overcome their stress, you can always ask for medical advice from a psychiatrist to help your kids talk it out more.

Give Your Kids Time to Play Games

Overscheduled plans and school tasks might cause kids to feel stressed and be less inclined to play games.

By encouraging your kids to play fun and educational brain games, you can help them overcome stressful situations and improve their cognitive skills.

Practice Mindfulness for Mental Health

Practicing mindfulness games and exercises can ease the stress and anxiety of kids by shifting their focus from negative thoughts to the present moment.

Mindfulness exercises for kids might include:

• Breathing exercises
• Yoga
• Meditation
• Muscle relaxation activities
• Nature walks
• Taking deep breaths with the 4-7-8 technique

Let Your Kids Solve Problems

Naturally, parents want to fix problems for their kids when they feel that they are struggling with stressful situations. Still, it is not the best idea to solve kids’ problems instead of teaching them how to generate solutions.

Thus, instead of fixing your kid’s problems, you should enhance their stress management skills by showing them ways to generate solutions in stressful situations. This can help them build better confidence in themselves in the long term.

Be Patient…

Obviously, helping kids manage stress is a long and complicated process for parents. Still, we know that with the right time and effort, it is possible to make your kids healthier and happier. All you need to do is be patient and teach them how to healthily cope with stress. We are sure that you will rock it.

Good luck!