Just a Thought: Helping Children Learn to Manage Stress

Photo Credit: Kinga Lipp

When a child is undergoing stress, parents are often at a loss for what to do. The intensity of giftedness complicates matters even further. Especially if the parent is also intense and under stress, challenging moments and events can easily explode into unmanageable ones.

Dr. Vidisha Patel, a therapist in Sarasota, Florida, who helps gifted children and their families learn to understand and deal with stress, offers this advice in her article “Stress Management and Gifted Children,” (Understanding Our Gifted, Summer 2009):

“Children need to be taught to understand that whatever they feel is okay. In every moment they have a choice. Do I want to continue to feel this way or do I want to feel something else? They have full control at all times to choose how they feel.”

The first step of helping children to understand that their feelings—whatever they are—are acceptable can be difficult for parents who haven’t themselves come to terms with what we think of as “negative” emotions, such as anger or jealousy. When our children experience rage, we might try to “fix” the feeling as fast as we can, or reason it away because of the discomfort it causes us. Sensitive children quickly pick up on these cues from their parents, and can learn to hide the feelings that cause their parents distress, or to feel guilty about them, as Sal Mendaglio explains:

“Parents’ responses … affect only the expression of emotions not the experience of them. For example, the young boy who is told that big boys don’t cry, still experiences sadness, though he learns to inhibit the expression of his sadness.”

Lesson for parents: Taking some time to be mindful of, sort through, and accept your own feelings is not selfish. It will allow you to relate more effectively to your intense children.

To help children to understand the control they have over feelings, parents can look for opportunities to discuss the connection between thought and feelings. When a child has just a “really bad day,” for example, one of those days when no side of the bed was the right side, allow just a little time to pass so that the emotions subside a bit, then talk about what the child was thinking about right before or at the beginning of the day. You don’t even need to make the explicit connection. Simply encourage the child to consider what was going through his mind when the emotions began to overwhelm him.

Gina M. Biegel, author of The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness Skills to Help You Deal with Stress, is an excellent resource for both teens and bright, younger children. She writes:

“What you think affects how you feel. If you generally look at the positive side of situations, it is likely that you will feel happier and more relaxed. But if your thoughts tend to be negative, you will probably feel more stressed.

But what if a negative thought was just a thought and nothing more? You may be giving more power to your negative thoughts than you need to. What if when you thought something you didn’t add to it and just noticed what was coming up for you?”

In this sense, learning to manage stress is all about improving our emotional intelligence. In a Duke Gifted Letter article, Sidney M. Moon, professor of Gifted Education and director of the Gifted Education Resource Institute at Purdue University, describes emotional intelligence as the “set of skills involved in perceiving, understanding, and regulating emotions.” She explains that having both low and high levels of emotional intelligence can pose challenges:

“Having a high IQ does not necessarily mean that a child will have high levels of emotional intelligence. A gifted child can have high, moderate, or low levels of it. Since emotional intelligence facilitates important life skills such as developing friendships and making good decisions, a gifted child who has moderate to high levels of it will have an easier time in life. Emotional intelligence improves one’s well-being and achievement and enables one to manage moods, recover from setbacks, and build supportive relationships. It helps individuals make good choices, defer gratification in the interests of long-term goals, and work effectively with others.

Gifted children who have low levels of emotional intelligence are at risk of social or emotional problems. Children with ADHD are usually low in emotional intelligence because their disorder affects the areas of the brain that manage emotions. They tend to experience greater frustration, lower self-esteem, and more peer rejection than most gifted children. Their low emotional intelligence makes life harder for them both at home and at school.

At the other end of the spectrum, gifted children with high levels of emotional intelligence may have difficulty managing the intensity and complexity of their feelings. They can be overwhelmed by their emotions unless they are in supportive environments that help them develop competence in understanding, interpreting, and coping with their feelings. If they do receive such support, they are likely to be unusually emotionally mature as adults.”

That final sentence is one very bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Resources:

Emotional Intelligence, by Sidney M. Moon

An Interview with Sal Mendaglio: About Meeting the Emotional Needs of Gifted Children and Adolescents, by Michael F. Shaughessy

Stress Management and Gifted Children, by Vidisha Patel

The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens, by Gina M. Biegel