Psychosocial stressors in children…

from the Swedish child-film Dunderklumpen (1974, English site here and Swedish here), I have played the first tune with a couple of pupils.

Peter Währborg (see former posting "Empathy and Stress...") also writes about children and psychosocial stressors at page 79-81 in his book (mentioned in the former posting).

He writes that in the main the same things which are stressing children are stressing adults.

The most important stressors are emotionally significant separations, for instance parents divorce, but also getting new teachers and classmates. When children loose a part of the body because of illness or accident they react with a powerful stress reaction, as when a person whom is important dies or moves. Children lives in a world which is a little bigger than adults understand Wärhborg writes.

Discomfort (vantrisel) being in a school and a class which only causes social and psychic suffering is of course not fun and causes (sometimes severe) stress in children. If you experience (thinks) you don’t manage especially well in school each failure gives new proofs on your insufficiency or inadequacy. The self esteem is jeopardized, and the inability to live up to the demands parents, teachers or others put turns into chronic stress.

Difficult relations are another source of stress in children. It looks as children in this case reacts more equal to grown up women, i.e., they react more pronounced on difficult relations than men do.

Children have many different sorts of relations which can play a significant or important role for the risk developing stress (my addition: and for minimizing the bad effects?).

Especially powerful are the stress reactions in children exposed to insulting “specific treatment” (särbehandling) or victimization (?) such as mobbing. (See this pdf-file on "Victimization at Work" from the Swedish National Board of Occupational Safety and Health).

Währborg thinks that children’s sensitivity means that the best would be if the classes were small and stable.

Encroachments (abuse), accidents, maltreatment or other severe traumas also causes stress. Sometimes this stress state is of a more serious nature, so called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Not least children who have immigrated can carry things with them that they haven’t got any opportunity to process.

Währborg also mentions time and decision conflicts as a source for stress reactions in children something we also see in adults. When children feel powerlessness or that they don’t have control over their situation they react with stress.

Children suffer more seriously because of lack of security and social stability. The family-situation plays an important role in this (in moderating, and in moderating both this and that?). Here it isn’t only a question of interaction-patterns in the family but also about events happening to the family.

My brief reflections: We have tended to minimize and belittle things children experience, and to sweep it under the rug? And it was even more so earlier? If you didn’t talk about bigger and smaller events or traumas they didn’t harm one thought. And the child and whole events became surrounded by silence.

See about the ACE-study here and here.