Stress from school can lead to anxiety and attention span issues that stem from the distraction it causes. Understanding how to help your child cope with school-based stress is an important part of parenting kids through their school years, and it starts with understanding the early signs of stress so that you can address the issue at its least complicated stage.
Recognizing the Signs
School-based stress often comes with signs that can be read as oppositional defiance, as children need to be taught the tools for managing stress and working through tasks instead of chronically avoiding the cause of the stress. It can also look like increased shyness and fearfulness around failure, and for many children, it rebounds between the two often.
Giving your child the room to say stop and the space to regroup is the first step toward fostering the kind of open communication that makes it easy to spot building stress because instead of fighting about it, you can investigate why there is resistance to the task and what needs to change for that resistance to change. In some cases, over the counter ADHD medication that also addresses anxiety can be useful.
Help Establish Routines
Routines help children form processes that allow them to do what they need to do without having to spend a lot of extra cognitive energy figuring out how. If there is no question about when homework is done or where then there is more mental energy for homework. Every decision you have to make throughout the day produces some stress because stress is just the friction caused by everyday life. Sometimes it is profound, sometimes it is small, but it all adds up even when there is no single large source of stress to point to.
Routines can help from toddlerhood forward, which is important because it is very hard to diagnose ADHD in 5 year old children, but attention span and anxiety issues are common in small kids, and parents need to know how to address them in ways that lead to long-term success through processes that reduce stress at least as much as they help kids learn to deal with it.
Healthy Regulation Processes
While routines help to reduce the extra stress involved in everyday chores and activities like homework, regulation processes are also necessary so kids learn how to handle stress and move past it, because there will always be some stress that you can’t avoid in life. That means understanding how to set boundaries and communicate which needs are being met and which aren’t. It also means understanding how to work through emotions and reach a point where you can make that communication happen.
If you are weighing stimulant vs non stimulant ADHD meds for child onset cases in early elementary school, make sure you are also putting the processes and support points in place that help your child to develop healthy long-term patterns of self-management. Start looking into how medications and behavioral changes work together to understand more about how to make the best choice for your child when you see signs of school-based stress.
