Some face the death of a loved one, move to a new neighborhood, or start a new school. Any of these life events can cause stress. When kids face difficult life events, they might feel stress on and off for a few days or weeks as they adjust. What parents can do: Parents can provide extra support and stability.

Listen and talk with your child. Help them feel safe and loved. If possible, let them know what to expect. Give comfort and show caring. Set up simple routines to help them feel settled. Even life events that we think of as good can be stressful. A big birthday, the first day of a school year, graduation, holidays, or travel can prompt kids and teens to feel stress.

Talk them through the situation, focusing on the positive parts. Give kids a say in the plans when possible. Listen to what they think and how they feel. Having a serious health condition that lasts for a long time can lead to chronic stress.

So can losing a parent or close family member or going through lasting adversity. And dealing with things like discrimination, racism , and gun violence can lead to chronic stress.

But there are things that can prevent the harmful effects of chronic stress. This is the stress that comes with trauma events that are serious, intense, or sudden. Traumas such as serious accidents or injuries, threats, abuse, or violence can prompt this type of stress. Parents can step in to protect kids when they know they are being mistreated or bullied.

If kids and teens go through traumatic stress, parents can help them get the care they need to recover. KidsHealth Parents Childhood Stress: How Parents Can Help. Childhood Stress: How Parents Can Help.

en español: Estrés infantil: Cómo pueden ayudar los padres. Medically reviewed by: Zachary Radcliff, PhD. Psychology Behavioral Health at Nemours Children's Health. Listen Play Stop Volume mp3 Settings Close Player. Larger text size Large text size Regular text size.

Stress has a purpose. When Can Stress Be Helpful? When Can Stress Be Harmful? You can: Help them use positive stress to go for goals, adapt to changes, face challenges, and gain confidence.

Give extra support and stability when they go through stressful life events. Protect them from the harmful effects of too much stress, such as chronic stress and traumatic stress. What Is Positive Stress? Positive stress gives kids the chance to grow and learn.

What Is Life Event Stress? Difficult Life Events Many kids and teens face difficult life events or adversity. Good Life Events Even life events that we think of as good can be stressful.

What Is Chronic Stress? What parents can do: Help kids feel safe, loved, and cared for. This is the best way to offset stress. Feeling close to you and knowing you love and accept them is more important than ever.

Provide routines, like the same bedtime, eating a meal together, or being there after school. Routines provide a rhythm and let kids know there are things they can count on. Teach coping skills. Kids feel better when they know there are things they can do for themselves to offset their stress.

Trained therapists. Enrolling in a parenting class can be helpful too. Studies indicate that parenting classes can reduce your feelings of anger, guilt, and stress — particularly if your child has difficult behavior problems Barlow et al ; Furlong et al ; Feinberg et al Not sure where to find these resources?

Try your family physician, as well as parenting helplines. For example, if you live in the United States, you can contact the National Parenting Helpline , operated by Parents Anonymous. If a child is temperamental, defiant, or high-strung, you may be persuaded that his next move will be negative one.

But your beliefs and biases can become self-fulfilling prophecies. After a very brief exposure to negative emotional content, people tend to pay more attention to upsetting images, threatening words, and negative feedback Cartwright-Hatton et al ; Forbes and Leitner They replay bad memories or worry about the future.

Such thoughts activate the stress circuits in the brain, causing even more anxiety and gloom. A single trigger — an angry comment, an unpleasant reminder, or a distressing anecdote — might be enough to set the process in motion.

Under certain conditions of crisis, this may be helpful. Switching to threat mode is a good idea when a lion is stalking you.

It can also undermine your ability to think constructively and solve problems. And that hurts everyone — you, your family, your neighbors, and coworkers.

This suggests a basic strategy for protecting yourself: Avoid unnecessary exposure to signals that drag you down. Switch off disturbing media; steer clear of hostile, rude, or judgmental people; consider taking a new route to work if it means avoiding noise, pollution, hassles, hostility, and other stressors.

The reverse is also true: We can induce good moods by downloading positive content to our brains. Reflect on happy memories, read uplifting stories, share jokes, and pet the family dog. All of these things have been shown to nudge brain chemistry away from stress and towards a state of calm and well-being Uvnäs-Moberg ; Mizugaki et al ; Norman et al ; Bennet et al ; Nagasawa et al In fact, bearing witness to positive social messages may help fill the void left by absent friends and family.

Focusing acts of kindness and social support — even those we see performed by strangers in a photograph — can deactivate the stress response Norman et al We feel less threatened when we reflect on the caring, helpful behavior of others Gillath and Karantza ; Wu et al In the comic novels of P.

Wodehouse, manservant Jeeves always knows what people will need — even before they do. You can take steps to become your own Jeeves by applying the lessons of modern psychology. How are you going to feel in a future situation? Experiments indicate that people are pretty bad at anticipating their future discomforts.

So analyze what goes wrong, and make a deliberate, conscious effort to help out your future self. Are the kids going to fight over that particular game?

Is that difficult relative going to stress you out? Decide ahead of time what you will do about it. Will the noise make you crazy?

Bring ear plugs. Researchers in Scandinavia report that mothers are more burdened by time pressure than fathers, and the women most affected are either highly educated, financially stressed, or lacking in social support Gunnarsdottir et al ; Gunnarsdottir et al Moreover, compared with adults, young children take longer to react, longer to check their impulses and longer to learn Lee et al ; Yim et al Little kids do things relatively slowly.

But even then, there is a lot you can do to cope. Studies show that people handle stress better when they reconsider the situation from a new angle Troy et al For example, HIV patients have better quality of life when they focus on the good things they experience, like improvements in their personal relationships Moscowitz et al ; Caracco et al And it appears that even a little positive thinking can make a measurable difference in how we feel.

In one study, researchers asked college students to spend 15 minutes writing about the most stressful event currently affecting their lives. Half the students were told only to explore their feelings; the other half were asked to engage in full-blown, positive cognitive reappraisal, to analyze the challenges and opportunities presented by their stressor, and to view their coping strategies in a positive light.

Immediately afterwards, the researchers evaluated emotional and psychosomatic symptoms in each student. What did they learn? I admire the way you dealt with this situation. Learning from these experiences is very important. Whenever you will experience something similar, you know better how to deal with it.

I wish you good luck in the future. I think it was an impressive story. It must have been intense to experience something like that. I experienced something quite similar, and I recognize a lot in your story. I understand how it must have felt and the impact it must have had on your life.

Take care. So positive cognitive reappraisal can help us bounce back, and that may be why parents who use cognitive reappraisal are less likely to engage in counterproductive, over-reactive discipline Lorber But we try to step outside ourselves and see the big picture, reflecting, for example, that loss is part of life Shiota and Levenson When your kid is miserable, you feel her pain, and that can be a good thing: It may motivate you to help.

They get too stressed out, and the results can lead to them to become snappish, harsh, or controlling Joosen et al In a study asking mothers to participate in a parenting simulation game, women with lots of affective empathy got a bigger hit of cortisol when they had to make decisions about distressed, unhappy kids.

They also experienced heightened activity in parts of the hypothalamus and amygdala, regions of the brain linked with anxiety and stress Ho et al So affective empathy causes stress, and that can undermine parenting.

On the contrary, we might actually serve kids better by practicing a little detachment. Poor sleep makes life difficult, so you want to fix sleep problems whenever you can. What should you do? By now it should be clear what not to do.

Besides, your kids are likely to sense your emotions, and that will make it harder for them to sleep Teti et al For help, see my Parenting Science guide.

Research shows that people adapt better when they avoid making emotional judgments about the state of their tiredness, when they stop calculating their hours, stop worrying about tomorrow, and focus instead on acceptance and making the best of things. In fact, practicing this change of attitude is an effective treatment for insomnia Ong et al They have to develop it, and they take their cues from us.

It begins with smart choices we can make with our infants, and continues throughout childhood: Calm, upbeat, constructive talk about emotions can help preschoolers develop strong social skills , empathy, and self-control. They also observed improvements in the ways that mothers handled their own emotions Ravindran et al In addition, check out these evidence-based social skills activities for children and teens.

Some things make us happy because they offer us immediate, selfish pleasure; other things offer a more lasting, meaningful type of happiness. Meaningful happiness seems to block toxic stress from reprogramming our DNA and increasing our risk of stress-related disease.

By contrast, self-gratifying happiness does not Frederickson et al Experiences that bring meaningful happiness are a crucial tool for keeping yourself fit and your family protected from second-hand stress. Bring more meaningful happiness in your life by finding ways to re-connect with the experiences, people, and goals that really matter to you.

As I explain elsewhere, spending time outdoors, in a natural environment, can reduce tension, anger, confusion, and depression e. It can also lower cortisol levels Hunter et al Experiments suggest that merely looking at nature scenes can improve your mood and help you recover from stress.

Aerobic exercise protects the body against the effects of physical and psychological stress Spalding et al It may also boost your mood, lower anxiety levels Altchilder and Motta , and stimulate the growth of new neurons in the brain.

But experiments suggest these results depend on free choice. When exercise is forced — involuntary — it can increase stress levels Li at al For more information about stress and family life, see my article about the effects of parenting stress, as well as these pages.

Altchiler L, Motta R. Effects of aerobic and nonaerobic exercise on anxiety, absenteeism, and job satisfaction. J Clin Psychol. Baker BL, McIntyre LL, Blacher J, Crnic K, Edelbrock C, Low C. Pre-school children with and without developmental delay: behaviour problems and parenting stress over time.

J Intellect Disabil Res. Barlow J, Smailagic N, Huband N, Roloff V, and Bennett C. Group-based parent training programmes for improving parental psychosocial health. Cochrane Database Syst Rev.

Batenburg A and Das E. An experimental study on the effectiveness of disclosing stressful life events and support messages: when cognitive reappraisal support decreases emotional distress, and emotional support is like saying nothing at all.

PLoS One. Bennett MP, Zeller JM, Rosenberg L, and McCann J. The effect of mirthful laughter on stress and natural killer cell activity. Altern Ther Health Med. Buehler R, Griffin D and Peetz J. Carrico AW, Antoni MH, Weaver KE, Lechner SC, and Schneiderman N. Cognitive-behavioural stress management with HIV-positive homosexual men: Mechanisms of sustained reductions in depressive symptoms.

Chronic Illness. Cartwright-Hatton S, Abeles P, Dixon C, Holliday C, and Hills B. Does parental anxiety cause biases in the processing of child-relevant threat material? Psychol Psychother 87 2 Cohen-Cline H, Turkheimer E, Duncan GE. Access to green space, physical activity and mental health: a twin study.