March

It's hard to turn on the news, open social media, or engage in even casual conversation with others without the mention of stress. As our world grows increasingly advanced and complex, we are presented with new challenges that can cause stress. Stress, a natural human response to acute or chronic triggers, is a state of mental tension that arises when we are faced with difficulties or threats in our lives (World Health Org., n.d.). Every person faces different, and responds differently, to stressors. People begin experiencing and mediating stress from before birth, and each person has a unique capacity to manage the stressors they face. While research shows that deficits in emotional regulation and coping strategies are linked to externalizing behavior and mental health problems in youth, these deficits can be targeted through intervention aimed at teaching and building coping strategies for children and adolescents to better manage stress (Mdecki et al., 2017). 

Coping refers to an individual's effort to regulate emotions, cognitions, physiology, behavior and situations in reaction to stressful events or challenging circumstances. During stressful situations, coping skills can help to diffuse or "turn down the volume" of intense emotion, allowing for increased control over an individual's response to the situation. Coping skills can be healthy (both providing relief in the moment and promoting long-term health), such as exercise, social connection, or meditation, or unhealthy (providing relief in the moment but do not promote long-term health), such as maladaptive or self-harm behavior, social withdrawal, or aggression. 

Research shows coping capacity is the most important factor related to stress management: well-developed coping strategies serve as the most significant protective factor for negating the toxic effects of stress on mental and physical well-being. Positive coping strategies have been shown to help moderate the relationship between stress and the development of more severe health problems, such as depressive symptoms and physical health concerns. By the time we reach adulthood, we have often developed an arsenal of coping strategies, with some perhaps more functional than others, that we turn to when feeling stressed or overwhelmed. Maybe it's watching a television show, engaging in physical exercise, calling a friend, or practicing meditation. We may consciously know we are choosing and practicing a coping strategy, or slip into what has become second nature. 

For children, however, bringing attention to how their bodies feel when experiencing stress, what strategies they can use to calm down, and what a return to regulation feels like instills a greater sense of competence, control, and independence. By learning that they can take action to manage emotions that may feel overwhelming, children feel safer and more able to handle their own experience.

Coping skills for children can be effective by serving different purposes:

• Self-soothing: engages the body's natural calming system (deep breathing, progressive muscle relation, meditation, temperature change such as drinking or splashing cold water)

• Distraction: redirects to more pleasurable activities to decrease intensity of emotion (listening to music, painting/drawing, puzzles, playing a game, talking to someone, "changing the channel" on your brain)

• Opposite action: activities that generate an emotion or experience counter to the distressing one (enjoyable activities, exercise)

• Emotional awareness: activities that promote emotional exploration and increase clarity (cognitive coping thoughts, e.g. "This situation is tough, but it's only temporary," "This feeling will pass;" positive affirmations, journaling)

• Mindfulness: focuses on being grounded in the present (grounding exercises like counting your breaths, counting or subtracting by sevens, counting the colors you see; five senses grounding activities: 5 things you see, 4 things you hear, 3 things you feel, 2 things you smell, 1 thing you taste)

A comprehensive meta-analysis of more than 200 coping and emotion regulation studies including more than 80,000 children and youth conducted by Bruce Compas, Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, found that ensuring children develop coping strategies that effectively ameliorate the negative effects of stress is of particular importance given its potential impact on the brain: “Chronic stress is bad for adults, but it is particularly troublesome for children, because among many other effects, it can disrupt still-developing white matter in the brain, causing long-term problems with complex thinking and memory skills, attention, learning and behavior." In the study, Compas and his team explored the effect of different types of coping strategies on subjects' internalized (depression, anxiety, loneliness) and externalized symptoms (antisocial behavior, aggression): "We found that when the subjects used adaptive strategies, like looking at a problem in a different way, engaging in problem solving or pursuing constructive communication, they were better able to manage the adverse effects of stress. Those who used maladaptive strategies like suppressing, avoiding or denying their feelings, had higher levels of problems associated with stress.”

The study concluded by emphasizing the importance of children developing proactive, positive coping skills as early as possible, and being reinforced for using strategies that help them manage overwhelming feelings: “Stress is the single most potent risk factor for mental health problems in children and adolescents, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders and substance use. But the good news is the brain is malleable. Once positive coping skills are learned and put into practice . . . they can be used to manage stress for a lifetime.”