Stress Management: 3 Tips to Help Children to Manage Stress

Learning how to manage stress is very difficult for adults to do so you can imagine how hard it is has to be for children especially when they are dealing with the stress of their family relationships, school, growing up and peer pressure just to name a few.

You can help your children effectively cope with stress by :

• Teaching them how to effectively communicate
  
• Teaching them to Identify their emotions and
  
• Teaching them to express their emotions constructively

#1: Teach Your Children How to Effectively Communicate

The first thing that you are going to need to do to help your child manage stress is to teach them that they should not suppress their feelings inside.You can help your child to effectively express to you the stressful situation that they may be dealing with by initiating a conversation with them and listening to their answers. You can start the conversation by asking:

• What has happened?
• How do they feel about what has happened?
• If they know how to calm down in order to make their self feel better?

#2: Teach Your Children How To Identify Their Emotions

When your child is under stress they may not know how to effectively express the emotions that they are feeling inside. You can help your child to identify if they are happy, sad, angry, scared, puzzled, worried etc. by going over a feelings poster with them. A feelings poster is a poster with several faces and a list of words to describe the feelings on the faces. You can download a free feelings poster by going on line and doing a Google search.

• Go over all of the expressions and explain to the child the meaning of each one
  
• Ask your child to identify which facial expression on the poster best describes what they are feeling inside.
  
• Your child may pick out more than one

#3: Teach Your Children How to Express Their Emotions Constructively

Once your child has learned how to tell you about the stressful incident and identify the emotions that they are feeling inside, the next thing that you are going to need to do is to teach your child how to express their emotions in a constructive manner.

You can help your child to deal with stress constructively by talking to your child about the benefits of using their energy to do something positive and the consequences of using their energy to do something destructive.

Constructive ways to express your emotions:

• Draw or paint
• Write, blog or journal
  
• Take a time out
• Dance
  
• Exercise
  
• Play sports
  
• Play a musical instrument

Destructive ways to express your emotions

• Fighting
• Destroying property
• Ignoring the situation
• Threatening others
• Eating disorders
• Drugs
• Self-harm

The best way to teach your child how to cope with stress is by teaching them how to talk to you about what is stressing them out, recognize the emotions they are feeling as a result of the stressful situation and then teaching them how to release their emotions in a positive manner. If you can teach your children at an early age how to manage their stress, it will be easy for them to deal successfully when they are grown.

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