Final Chapter 9 Entry

Annette Cipolla is the author of our final entry on chapter 9. She was able to relate Elkind's ideas to the lives of her children, and I think you'll appreciate her insight.

She wrote:
In chapter 9, Elkind addresses ways that children react to stress. Children feel stress from daily life that shows up as behaviors such as irritability and restlessness or general unhappiness and withdrawal. A Freudian term Elkind used that is new to me is free-floating anxiety, which he says derives from “simply not knowing what to be afraid of” (p. 187). It is commonly found in children who have parents that are separated or switch between many caregivers. I think their anxiety is caused by children feeling instability in their lives. They may not be afraid of anything in particular or even be able to explain what is wrong, but they definitely feel the stress of not knowing what’s going to happen next. I agree with Elkind that it is the separation from parents that is the most stressful for children. I offer my own children as an example.

I have three sons, who were ages 6, 7, and 12 at the time our family got divorced. They are now 16, 17, and 22. As a parent I thought I was relieving the stress on my children because they were living in a home with constant fighting. In reality it did not happen that way. While our home did become calmer, my children began to feel the stress of separation. Their lives became very unstable because their father began to work out of town a lot with the result being an inconsistent relationship between children and father. Over the years, my youngest has gone from having outbursts over his dad not showing up, to being apathetic and refusing to see him. My middle son would stare out the window, crying; at the time, he said he was wishing for his dad to come home. He has never expressed that he wanted us together nor has he placed blame on anyone. However, he has suffered from depression and, I believe in part, it is because he internalized all the anxiety he felt from missing his father. My oldest seemed to handle it quite well; although, as an adult, I see that he is living the same rushed life as his father and is constantly stressed.

This reminds me of a comparison Elkind made about burnout. He compared the symptoms of job burnout that adults feel to the symptoms of school burnout that children feel. Burnout is something I have witnessed and experienced and I do feel that it is prevalent in today’s school system. Learning is an insatiable joy for most children when they are very young and learn out of curiosity. Therefore, they are excited about going to school and learning new things. The anticipate the novelty of school experiences, but soon the demands of getting the answers correct and the overwhelming workload lead to stress. As we have discussed in class, children get homework in kindergarten and are given tests with grades. Imagine how a five year old feels when she is told she failed a spelling test or does not read well enough to go on to first grade with all the new friends she made. I would think that the loss of self confidence would be significant. Isn’t that too high a price for children to pay just because our society is in a hurry for them to learn? Not to mention, if children feel like failures in elementary school, how will they have confidence to get through junior high and high school? The chronic stress of always trying to keep up and do well can be overwhelming, and as Elkind says, can lead to learned helplessness that can possibly affect them for the rest of their lives.

One thing in chapter 9 that was particularly interesting to me is the studies that were done on children to test for Type A and Type B personality traits. Surprisingly, children’s personality traits didn’t correlate as much with their parents’ type as much as it did to how they were treated. Children with Type A personalities were more likely to have parents that pushed them to do well in addition to being more critical of their children's performance regardless of their own personality type. Children with Type B personalities received more praise and patience. This is an important concept for parents to realize. If parents offer praise, patience, and encouragement they will make it easier for children to deal with the stresses they experience.

In some cases, though, children are capable of coping with stress quite well on their own. This was Elkind’s last thought in the chapter. It is an intriguing fact that some children in extremely stressful environments use it as a motivator to accomplish their goals. Researchers have found that these children have these five qualities in common: social competence, impression management, self-confidence, independence, and achievement. I think that children with these abilities that lack support from home have similar temperaments that enable them to cope. It is my opinion that children who are highly sociable would fall into a category of having those five qualities. As a final thought, I think society as a whole would benefit if children and adults were taught coping skills to deal with the enormous stresses of living in a rushed society. Stress is unavoidable. Unfortunately, many adults lack the ability to deal with their own stresses which contributes to the growing stresses placed upon children.