Stress Management Skills for Teens
Helping Kids Cope with Pressure and Disappointment
Kids today are dealing with more stress than ever before. Help your kids learn the tools for coping with the ups and down of life.
Stress is a normal part of life. However, for many teens, overscheduled lives, chaotic home situations, school pressures, and social concerns can tax kids to the breaking point. Without appropriate, positive stress management skills, kids can become easily overwhelmed. Some may even substitute unhealthy coping skills, such as drug or alcohol use, or may begin to shows signs of depression.
What can you do?
Normalize stress. Make sure kids know that frustration and stress are part of everyone’s life. By nature, teens are egocentric, and can have difficulty seeing the perspective of other people. They may incorrectly believe that they alone feel this way, which can be very isolating. Helping kids recognize the universality of stress can be a welcome relief.
Help kids identify stressors. There may be particular things that cause a teen anxiety, and they may differ from kid to kid. Some kids get anxious about working under deadlines, while some kids thrive on it. Some teens panic at the idea of going to a huge party, while others love being part of the action. The key is to help each kid identify where their pressure is coming from. You might also have kids rate their level of stress on a 1-10 scale to help gauge the intensity of what they are feeling.
Minimize where possible. Brainstorm ways to alleviate as much of the stress as you can. This may not always be an option, but when it is, try to problem solve some choices so that kids can avoid stressful situations. Often kids have difficulty predicting outcomes; this means that behavioral consequences that are obvious to us aren’t always obvious to them. A teen who procrastinates on a school project and then gets stressed when the due date approaches may need help tying together the cause and effect parts of the situation. Identify changes to be made for the future.
Identify stress busters. Have kids develop a list of options they can use when stress builds up to high levels. Different things will relieve stress for different kids. For example, one student may find relief in shooting hoops or listening to music, while another teen might prefer to write in a journal or take a bubble bath. Have teens come up with as many ideas as possible that they think might work for them, and write them down. Have them keep the list in a handy place so it is accessible when it’s needed.
See what works. Students can keep a log of stressful situations to measure how their stress management skills are developing. For each entry, they can write the stressor, intensity level, and ways they can work to minimize the stress if the situation happens again. They can also note which stress buster they used, if applicable, and rate how helpful it was. Later, teens can reflect back on what they wrote to check their progress.
