Is the child anxious about school starting?- Learn the 3 ways to help school year!

07:45 pm

26/08/2022

 

Is the child anxious about school starting?- Learn the 3 ways to help school year!

Stress can have a devastating effect on how children manage the challenges they face at school. Chronic stress can affect the ability to concentrate and learn, causing school problems that can have a lifelong negative impact.

 

Is the child anxious about school starting?- Learn the 3 ways to help school year!

This increase in stress is a real problem for our youth. In addition, it can lead to serious mental health problems, depression, substance use, and even suicide. These numbers are steadily increasing, with anxiety disorders in children and adolescents increasing by 20 percent in recent years.

 How to train your child to manage  stress? 

Anxiety for the child can appear when he has to deal with school demands, social pressures, face family members or struggles to master self-esteem. However, when the child is too emotionally distressed to focus, listen and interact meaningfully it means that their stress level has come to seriously affect their lives, now as teenagers and adults.

Ironically, the worst part of anxiety is being anxious about anxiety itself. In other words, it works like an avalanche rolling down a hill and significantly increases uncontrollable stress. Combining mindfulness, healthy self-talk, and resilience-building activities helps children and teens manage stress.

The positive thing is that the child can learn to deal with stress by learning two necessary skills: calmness and problem solving. Skills that are equally critical for all adults to function and thrive in our world.

     What are the three ways of success? 

Below are three techniques that incorporate calming and problem-solving skills that you can use with your child to help them manage stress:

     1. Preparation and routine 

Anxiety-prone children generally find transitions difficult: eg. going from home to school. While most children in this age of COVID have now returned to school, the value of preparing for transitions applies to online learning as well. Some kids benefit from the extra prep time.

If your child is anxious, they certainly don't do well with a disorganized, spontaneous family lifestyle. A regular routine gives both parent and child a sense of control. Routines and schedules can help a child regulate their emotions because they will know what to expect each day.

     2. Teach him mindfulness and self-compassion 

Mindfulness exercises will help the child develop concentration, self-awareness and relaxation skills. The more the child learns to focus on comforting images and sensations, the less they will focus and think about their anxiety. From a self-compassion perspective, it's helpful to teach children to recognize mistakes and talk to themselves kindly about mistakes.

If your child doesn't feel ready to express his feelings to you, ask him to talk as he would with a friend. Compassion is often more easily expressed with friends than with parents. Learning self-compassion is a key skill for reducing stress in children.

3. Encourage him to see the positives in  the negatives as well 

Learning a broader perspective helps combat discouragement and turns potentially destructive days into productive ones. It teaches the child that there is also a negative side and builds his self-esteem. For example, for a lesson he should learn to think how:

“Yeah, I didn't do well on my math homework. However, I will keep working on it and try even harder. And, if that doesn't help, I can ask my teacher for extra help and let him know that I'm really trying hard."

• Here are two more examples that demonstrate the power of this practice:
• 
  
• Try."
• 
  
• “I made a mistake last week in....

What are the causes of school anxiety? 

The causes of school anxiety vary from one child to another. There is usually not just one big factor that causes school phobia or avoidance. Rather, it tends to be a culmination of factors that have grown over time.

Some of the factors that may cause school avoidance include difficulties in the parent/child relationship, low self-esteem, academic challenges, social problems. There may still be a history of mental health problems in either the children or their parents.

Other causes of school avoidance may be a past bad experience or some challenge associated with school. This Or maybe something happened to a student that he felt inadequate to respond to and that made him feel unsafe in the classroom....

script async src=httpspagead2.googlesyndication.compageadjsadsbygoogle.jsclient=ca-pub-6636949338028698 crossorigin=anonymousscript ins class=adsbygoogle style=displayblock data-ad-format=fluid data-ad-layout-key=-ef+6k-30-ac+ty data-ad-client=ca-pub-6636949338028698 data-ad-slot=6612312715ins script (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push({}); script