Childhood Stress Research Paper

Stress can be tough on you. Throughout children's lives they have played countless hours of sports that have interfered with schoolwork, which obviously is not the certain stress other children can be under but this has created an environment of stress, good or bad it doesn’t matter, each day children are stressed. For years, children would miss school due to sporting events and have a tremendous amount of make up work to do in order to keep up with their grades and on top of that, a child's parents want them to perform well on and off of the court, including in school. Yes, this causes children to learn how to overcome problems and deal with a tremendous amount of work and still be able to find a way to make it happen through all the struggle.
These coping strategies are excellent for any child to learn at a young age, but it also has caused anxiety throughout their lives , anxiety that children might not of felt if this pressure and stress was not put on them as a child. Childhood stress is inevitable, everyone has to experience some kind of stress throughout their life, good or bad. Stress is any force that disrupts one's normal state of well being (Dowshen, 2015). Some amount of stress is necessary for a child because it will help the child develop a set of skills that they will need in order to get through tough situations throughout their lifetime.
Stress can be toxic and can lead to a variety of different health defects.
Stress can lead to problems with your immune system, nervous system, and cause malfunctions with the child's brain development (Chrousos,2002). The researcher is studying the components of childhood stress to learn its effects on children and how they can cope with the negative stress through the process of resilience.
Childhood stress can affect each individual in different ways. There are three types of stress; toxic, tolerable, and positive. Toxic stress is when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver
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substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship without adequate adult support (Friedman, 2013). “Tolerable stress is caused due to a response which activates the body’s alert systems to a higher degree causing more severe, longer-lasting difficulties (Bloom, 2010 p.1).” For example, a natural disaster, or a frightening injury. If the amount of stress is time-limited and is constantly positively helped by their relationships with adults, their brain and other organs will recover before they
have damaging effects. Positive stress is a normal and a vital part of healthy development, described by brief increases in heart rate and elevations in hormone levels. Some situations that could give a positive stress response are the first day with a new babysitter or by receiving your first shot of some sort from the doctor. These three types of stress have an effect on children, good or bad.
Children who tend to have mild stress can be beneficial later on in their life by helping children develop skills needed to adapt to new situations and deal with dangerous altercations.
Although stress is a factor for the average human being, it can also mold a child's life.
How to deal with this stress is a hard methodical process that not only you, but your support system around you has to put a lot of time and effort into. Resilience may not be the cure for stress but resilience and stress have a strong connection to one another. We all experience stress in our day-to-day lives and children are no exception to this. “There is also quite a bit of variability in what individuals find stressful - what is stressful to one may not be stressful for others. The ability to cope with stress will depend on the degree of stress, the supporters who are protective, and the type and helpfulness of coping skills children have developed (Asher,
2013,).” “Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress (Fleming & Ledogar, 2008).” Being resilient does not
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mean that a person doesn't experience difficulty or distress, normally it comes along with it.
Emotional pain and sadness are common in people who have suffered major adversity or
trauma in their lives. In fact, the road to resilience is likely to involve emotional distress. Resilience is when you overcome these emotional traumas in your life, to only make you stronger.
Resilience is a simple definition that the majority of people use everyday when dealing with an emotion or trauma. People have to realize resilience is a promise and not something you can learn over night and whatever you're worrying about is gone. It takes time and hard work to force through and see the light at the end of the tunnel and to know things are going to get better.
No matter what you or someone else is going through, with resilience you can conquer everything and overcome any obstacle. Resilience ties in perfectly with character. Character is how you act when no one is looking just as resiliency is how you act when you are facing a tremendous obstacle or an unstable emotional state. Developing resilience is a personal journey, one that all people do not react the same to traumatic childhood stress. One way to building resilience that could work for one person might not work for another. How we can all find resilience is by using varying strategies. Some variation between strategies may reflect cultural differences. A person's culture could have an impact on how he or she communicates feelings and deals with adversity. Overall resilience throughout any culture is the one and only thing that can help us overcome our fears, weaknesses, and helps us cope with our stress. Resilience gives us hope, which we all need. If we follow it, we will end up in the right direction.