Less-Stressed Kids

Better Homes and Gardens, February 2008

Like most kids his age, 15-year-old Mason Saliba Smith has a schedule that sounds like an anxiety attack on paper. Classes at a competitive Los Angeles high school. A hectic social scene to navigate. A barrage of tests to take every week. But when he gets home each day, Mason takes a few minutes in his bedroom to sit calmly, spine straight, and meditate, a practice he learned from his yoga teacher. "School definitely deals a lot of stress to me, and yoga basically nullifies that," he says. "After yoga, I feel calm."

And calm is what most tweens and teens aren't these days. One survey by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health found that more than half of 9- to 17-year-olds studied were either moderately or highly stressed out. You can't eliminate all stress, but you can help your child manage the pressure in healthy ways, whether it's enrolling in a yoga class at a local fitness club, making space at home for meditation, or cutting down on after-school commitments. "Life is going to be stressful. We can't protect our kids from it," says Kenneth Ginsburg, MD, a specialist in adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and author of A Parent's Guide to Building Resilience in Children and Teens. "A parent's challenge is to raise children with a wide repertoire of coping strategies." Here's help doing that.

Allow downtime. As much as it may pain you to see your teen lying on his bed like a slug, let him -- time to unwind after school protects mental health. "For teenagers, downtime is productive because they're thinking about their day, figuring things out," says Roni Cohen Sandler, PhD, author of Stressed-Out Girls: Helping Them Thrive in the Age of Pressure. "They have to go through that to recharge." Talk with your child about her preferences for after-school unwind time, and hold off on homework and chore demands until later. Make sure your child has a couple of days each week free of after-school activities. The empty afternoons allow time for homework and play, so kids are less stressed the rest of the week.

Break problems into bite-size pieces. An overwhelming to-do list can paralyze your kid. Help turn the mountain into a series of molehills. With younger children that can mean dividing a spelling list into five words to memorize nightly. Older teens might need help organizing tasks for a major research paper, so work together to set priorities.

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