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Help your child to free his stress

Written by Laurence

Monday, 16 February 2009 08:59

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It's hard to be a child! Can you imagine how you would feel if your body and mind were changing rapidly? How would it be if you made new discoveries every day, if your world changed 90 degrees? It's hard and it's stressful. It's not easy to be a child.

Many psychologists and child care experts think that nature has given us mechanisms to deal with this stress. As adults we like to talk about it. How many people can't get to sleep at night until they've talked about their day? Phew..... now we feel better.

Children are no different except they lack the language skills, especially when very small, to express their stress. So what do they do? They cry. Through crying and raging children can externalise the stress they've built-up.

Our reaction as a society is one that goes against this nature. We feel guilty or embarrassed if our child cries. We feel that we're failing as parents because our child is upset. We give our children pacifiers or dummies so that they remain quiet. Yet, this is not the reaction we should have. Children have their own needs that are often different to ours and we are not always able or willing to satisfy their needs. It's essential that we acknowledge that children do have their own needs.

Once we can accept that a child needs to cry, then we can remove the pacifier and listen to their stress. A child that cries is talking to you and must feel that you understand what they are communicating, hence you need to participate through active listening. You must tell your child that you understand their stress, frustration and difficulties. If you know that they have a new experience or capability during the day, then you can imagine during their crying that they are telling you about this. Remember too that even though a child cannot speak, they can understand what you are telling them.

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Dr Aletha Solter, a Swiss-American psychologist specialising in child development suggests that when a child starts crying it's first important to ensure that there are no immediate (physical) needs, such as thirst or being stuck in a chair. Once you are sure that this is not the case you can start helping your child to relieve their stress. How best to do this? Dr Solter recommends that: "...babies should always be picked-up and held when crying. It's not always necessary to pick-up and hold children past infancy when they are crying, but they always benefit from aware attention."

Martha G Welch, M.D., in her book "Holding Time" suggests that holding a child is essential to help them liberate their feelings otherwise they will learn to suppress them. The danger of this is that the suppressed feelings can be exteriorised at a later date through violence or a lack of self-esteem thus thwarting the child's future development.

In " Holding Time" Dr Welch identifies three phases: confrontation, rejection and resolution. In the first phase, your child may be quiet and comfortable or may progress very rapidly to the rejection phase where your child will try to resist you. Resistance can be both physical and or verbal in nature and will require that you hold your child lovingly whilst he exteriorises his stress. In the resolution phase, your child will become calmer, will relax into your arms and look you in your eyes. You may hear him release a deep, relaxing sigh.

Learning how to hold your child, how they exteriorise their stress and when they need to is a key skill to learn as a parent. Each child is different so it's an act of love that you will both learn to experience together.