AP Article regarding STRESS and college students....Thoughts?

[Beth in SW WA]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j3ovkZjBS46fCVQDiRjosCHzU2WQD8VFTN6G0

[Jane in NC]

Oh, good grief!

 

Many of us attended college, worked too many hours on outside jobs, functioned on too little sleep, overcame mono or other illnesses, etc., yet still managed to graduate with honors. We were college students. Stress came with the package.

 

I often think we have become a nation of whiners...

 

Jane

[HollyinNNV]

My thoughts are best expressed in graphic form:

:nopity:

[Myrtle]

"Majorities cite classic stress symptoms including trouble concentrating, sleeping and finding motivation. Most say they have also been agitated, worried, too tired to work.

 

"Everything is being piled on at once," said Chris Curran, a junior at the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, N.Y. He said he has learned to cope better since starting school. "You just get really agitated and anxious. Then you start procrastinating, and it all piles up."

 

I did check the URL to make sure that I hadn't accidentally clicked onto the Onion.

 

I don't know what to say.

 

Once they hit the world of working adults they will look back on their college days as nirvana.

[Sharon in MD]

My thoughts are best expressed in graphic form:

:nopity:

 

Too much of this

:party::cheers2:

 

Leads to

:svengo:

 

:nopity: Or as a friend of mine would say "Gee, do you think they'd like a little cheese with their Whine?"

[Laura K (NC)]

nt

[Tokyomarie]

I have had conversations with a number of parents of college-age young people who have commented that kids today seem less resilient than young people in our day. Don't know if that's really true or not, but sometimes I think so.

[cstitches]

kids today seem less resilient than young people in our day

 

I agree.

 

However, I don't think the students are entirely to blame. If students are struggling on such a significant scale, it probably has something to do with the influences in their lives that are supposed to prepare them for it: parents and school. I know neither my parents nor my schools ever helped me to understand the world and my place in it, and I imagine plenty of students who are following the "well-beaten path" are only doing it because they think that's what they're supposed to do, not because it's meaningful to them or they understand its place in their life.

 

As a college student who deals with the some of the same issues mentioned in the article, and having seen these patterns among my peers, I understand the reality of it. I think it's pathetic, but when you have no perspective on what's going on and lack the skills to deal with it besides, it's not really that surprising. I'm fortunate to at least have the perspective now, but because no one helped foster self-discipline and the ability to work hard in me, I'm having to do it myself.

 

I don't know what changed, if it's the pervasiveness of media, or a serious downfall in parenting and the school system, or a shift in attitude within our society in general (speaking from a US standpoint here), or what. But whatever it is, it sucks.

[Michelle in MO]

It could be that kids are too used to having it easy, and then suddenly in college they find that they have to buckle down and work harder than they've ever had to work before.

 

But---how do you teach your kids to handle stress, in the long run? How do we raise our children to avoid these pitfalls?

 

Just two hours ago I got a phone call from an acquaintance. She called to tell me that the son of some friends of ours just committed suicide. The parents were very loving, very accessible people. The boy was probably around 21 years old and just about to graduate from college. It sounds like there was maybe a broken relationship with a girl. At any rate, this is a solid Christian family and the mother homeschooled all three children, at one point in time. They are devastated.

 

How do you teach your children to manage stress? How do we teach them that, more important than girls or great jobs or high grades, their overall health and happiness are important, too?

 

I don't know. I'm just musing aloud. I'm still reeling from this news. I never would have thought this situation possible with this family.

 

:(

[Tokyomarie]

Oh, Michelle, I am so sorry to hear this news. This brings the words of the article too close to home.

 

I wish I knew the answers to how to help students learn to deal with stress- and especially rejection. I've had my own share of struggle with my own children, trying to figure out how to help them be just a bit more resilient, a little tougher, without losing the sweetness in their hearts.

[Nan in Mass]

I haven't read the article (bad headache making reading hard), so I probably shouldn't be chiming in, especially since it sounds like the article is being silly. College and stress are naturally alligned. It is a weird time of one's life, when one is burning one's candle at both ends, hurry-up-wait-ing, ostrich-ing, and panicking, whenever one isn't too busy to think.

 

But that aside, I do think that my 20yo and his friends are somehow more stressed than we were at his age. I can only judge for one sort of person, but my children and their friends are on the surface very much like my husband and I were: college educated parents with good jobs living comfortably in the suburbs in an area where it is expected that at least a third of the high schoolers will go to fairly selective colleges and another third to less selective ones. So why are they so stressed out that they are almost paralyzed, unable to go forwards with their lives?

 

It isn't that they are less resiliant, as far as I can tell. These teenagers are trying to deal with things that we somehow didn't worry about until after we were through college and quite a bit older. I think maybe they are less sheltered than we were, with less faith in the adults in their lives, and less faith that their world and the things they love are still going to be there for them in the future. They feel they have no one but themselves to rely on. They have trouble both looking ahead and doing what they need to do for the future, and doing what they need to today. They are paralyzed by a sort of panic and despair that in their positions they have no need to be feeling. I'm surprised more of them don't commit suicide. I think they are very brave not to.

 

-Nan

[Rhondabee]

I wasn't even aware that I was alive during the Vietnam War until I was in college (never did get that far in high school history) - and my dad was in the service. They just never bothered to tell me (or, now I think, chose not to).

 

Yet, when I was student teaching during 1991, the schools would be showing the Gulf War live on CNN during lunch to K-5th graders!!!!!! :glare: I was appalled, but what can ya do?

 

OH - They did have a separate room available for those students whose parent(s) had been deployed, and might be upset by viewing such images. Nice, huh?

 

There are SO many things I didn't know about til high school (or beyond), that my own children already know (oldest just turned 13yo), and it breaks my heart. And I'm probably a bit over-protective. I won't even watch the news when my dc are around. I tried to the other day thinking I need to expand their world a bit, and had to turn it off.

 

So, yeah. :iagree:

[Nan in Mass]

I can't remember how old your children are, so if this advice is redundant, forgive me. : )

 

Don't worry about being over-sheltering. I have found that even my 20yo son needs our house to be a safe place from the stresses of the world, a place where the news can't reach and where no one yells and everyone is more or less happy and comfortable, or at least pretends to be. And he is working as a plumber in Boston with refugees and inner city kids as coworkers. Definately not sheltered.

 

I'm horrified at your school system. Mine was showing 5th graders Roots, and I thought that was bad!

 

How can our children be persuaded to grow up unless we show them an adult world that they would want to live in?

 

-Nan

[Michelle in MO]

our children (almost grown-up children, that is) need a place of refuge from the stress of college, but they don't need to be sheltered. That's a good balance to achieve!

 

I hope we can provide that for our girls. Unfortunately, in our community there's only one community college. It has a very limited program of 4-year degrees.

 

I still wonder how we raise our children to be resilient. I supposed whenever they encounter lumps and bumps in relationships, school, work, etc., we need to give them the best advice we have and train them to not allow these problems to overwhelm them.

[Nan in Mass]

I have some thoughts on resiliency, but I have to do Latin and physics this morning. I've been thinking about your question for some time now as I watch my son and his friends struggle to grow up. I'll get back to you. : )

[Nan in Mass]

I am way way unqualified to answer this question. It is one of the big parenting questions, right up there with how you raise consciencious children and how you raise confident ones. Everyone's family is different and so, everyone's solution will have to be different, and nobody is parenting under ideal circumstances, so everyone will just have to do the best they can, even if they have managed to figure out what the ideal way for them should be. Which is rather unhelpful.

 

What might be helpful is my observations of the older teens I know, especially the struggling ones.

 

Of those, the ones who have a parent who is alcoholic have trouble being resilient. I think, since they have loving parents and a loving community, they will be ok in the end, but they are taking a long time to get there. It is harder for them to grow up. Perhaps they have to be older and stronger before they can be adult because being adult requires making more of a break from their parents. They don't get to make a gradual transition, one which looks pretty grown up from the outside but really requires lots of support still on the inside. When they decide to be grown up, they have to do it completely and at once because their parental support is unreliable, so they either do it before they can handle it well and go a bit wild until they grow up even more, or they drift until they are older and can make the break. This is, unhappily, too common a problem to ignore.

 

The ones who have very authoritarian parents have trouble being resilient. To be grown up, they have to make the "right" decisions. If they don't, they pay a heavy price. This makes it hard to make decisions and hard to recover from occasionally making the wrong one. Their other choice is to be strong enough to make a more complete break with their families, again, putting them in the same position as the children of alcoholics.

 

The ones who have very permissive or uninterested parents have trouble, but it isn't usually with resiliency. They have made lots of bad decisions and lived to make more bad decisions. They have trouble for other reasons.

 

The more conservative Christian ones I know have trouble with resiliency, too. I don't think this is a problem with the religion, but how it is presented to children. I think sometimes too much is promised, and when it doesn't come, the child either thinks it must be because they are bad (definately not good for resiliency) or has a crisis of faith (also very not good for resiliency). I don't think it occurs to the child that they might somewhere along the line have misinterpreted something their church and community and parents were telling them. Children are now people, and young adults are even more so because the now of childhood has arrived. Unless they have thoroughly learned that a bad thing happening to them now had to happen so that something better could happen later (possibly much later), they may conclude that they are a bad person or lose their faith. I think, too, that it helps if they understand that sometimes a bad thing for one person is a good thing for someone else, someone who might need it more.

 

The children in families with high expectations of some sort, academic or moral or financial or in social service, also seem to have trouble unless the parents have taken very great care to explain that one grows into these achievements slowly, a little at a time, over the course of a long life-time.

 

I'm not sure what all this means, but perhaps something in all this will help you to see what might have happened with your friend's son and help you have some confidence that you are avoiding the problem. Unfortunately, I think a lot of it boils down not to doing or not doing something, but to doing the right *amount* of something, a much harder thing because it requires figuring out what the right amount is for each particular child in each particular situation. How much information will overwhelm and produce despair, and how much will inspire and strengthen and educate? I think it is important to make a distinction in your reaction between when your child does something totally morally unacceptable or very dangerous, and when they do something silly or stupid or weak that won't lead to horrible natural consequences. If you treat them all the same, I think that makes an awful large cummulative burden of guilt for the child to deal with. I think the things I said in the earlier post are important to teaching resiliency. And lastly, I know another, much easier thing, too. This one is fun.

 

My father says it is very important to tell your children stories, lots and lots of stories, about your own childhood and young adulthood, for this very reason. We are a high-strung, almost-too-sensitive-to-survive, guilt-ridden family with extremely high moral expectations, and this what he says counteracts that. Thinking back on my own experience of growing up, I know that when I was very young, I found the stories of my mother being bad to her sister very comforting when I lost my temper with my own sister. Then I found them comforting later, when I was old enough to be horrified by some of the things I'd made up to play, like chicken-in-the-road: I was the car and my sister was the chicken and I ran her over. We both loved it at the time, but when I was a bit older, I had grave doubts about how much I'd enjoyed running over my sister. I knew my mother and her sister had survived similar childhood misjudgements and gone on to have a nice, loving relationship as adults. I took comfort in my mother's stories of staying up all night to write English papers, and not being able to keep the house clean, and not thinking she'd ever get married, and my father's being sent to a community college because his family didn't think he was ready for the big university, and my father's spending the night in jail for getting caught speeding in Maryland and having to call his father to bail him out, and my grandparents' stories of messing up and the stories they told of their parents messing up... lots and lots of stories about apparently perfect adults messing up when they were young. And later being frank about it when they messed up when we were watching, frank and not too hard on themselves, making amends as best they could and moving on.

 

I hope this helps and comforts you some. I worry so much about my sons and their friends. What a horrendous thing you and your friends are dealing with!

 

Hugs and best wishes,

-Nan

 

PS I hope my frankness hasn't hurt anyone.

[Janet in WA]

I wasn't even aware that I was alive during the Vietnam War until I was in college (never did get that far in high school history) - and my dad was in the service. They just never bothered to tell me (or, now I think, chose not to).

 

Yet, when I was student teaching during 1991, the schools would be showing the Gulf War live on CNN during lunch to K-5th graders!!!!!! :glare: I was appalled, but what can ya do?

 

OH - They did have a separate room available for those students whose parent(s) had been deployed, and might be upset by viewing such images. Nice, huh?

 

There are SO many things I didn't know about til high school (or beyond), that my own children already know (oldest just turned 13yo), and it breaks my heart. And I'm probably a bit over-protective. I won't even watch the news when my dc are around. I tried to the other day thinking I need to expand their world a bit, and had to turn it off.

 

So, yeah. :iagree:

And don't forget the schools turning on the TV's for students to watch 9/11 coverage.

[Jane in NC]

Nan,

 

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your response.

 

As I consider resiliency among my own friends and acquaintences, as well as my son's, it seems worthwhile to comment that not all of us are dealt an equal hand. Some kids display a resiliency while facing some of life's most difficult blows (death or serious illness of parent or friend) while others cannot face the demands of a job or classroom without difficulty. Siblings often react so differently to similar circumstances--why is that?

 

One thing that was huge in my own life is the interest that adults demonstrated toward me when I was a teen/young adult. In junior high, my choir director would take me out for ice cream and conversation. My speech teacher in high school would question us as we drove to our forensic and debate competitions. At my small, liberal arts college, professors would invite us for coffee, conversations that went beyond the classroom. I did not have an open door to quality conversation with my parents (or so I thought back then) but there were adults who surrounded me, cared for me and encouraged me.

 

In fact, this is one thing that I try to cultivate with kids I know. I want any of them to feel that they can talk to me at any time. Similarly, I know that my son has a world of wonderful adults with whom he can consult and converse. If for some reason he can't talk to his parents, I hope that he will go to one of those adults for advice.

 

Interesting post, Nan.

Jane

[Nan in Mass]

I am quite sure that genetics accounts for the very large differences between my first two boys.

 

I hope lots of people post about how what they think makes teenagers resilient. Maybe we can hive-mind our way to some answers.

[Michelle in MO]

Nan, you shared so well from your heart about how kids learn to be resilient, and Jane explained also how genetics does have a role to play in a child's emotional make-up.

 

Looking back on my own years as a teenager, although neither of my parents were alcoholics, my parents did get divorced when I was 15 years old. There was a long period of time when I could not rely on either parent to give me either the comfort or emotional stability I needed. Instead, God, in His mercy, brought some very godly, stable adults in my life who were able to counsel me through many of those torturous roads of adolescence and early adulthood. The college years were as difficult as the high school years, because my dear mother never really regained her emotional stability after the breakup of my parents' marriage. I felt at times that I really had to "fight" in order to keep an even keel in my own life.

 

I guess Jane's post reminded me of how important significant "other" adults can be in a teen's or young adult's life, and Nan's post reminds me of how important it is that don't make our children prisoners of our expectations.

 

Thank you both!

[Nan in Mass]

The more I think about this, the more I remember. My parents deliberately taught us the strategies that they themselves used for coping with failure and worry. My father did worst-case-scenarios. He'd say, "Well, what is the worst thing that could happen?" By the time I'd run through that, I was prepared for it if it did occur and knew what was involved and what wasn't. This was very helpful for reducing panic. His other strategy was to deliberately expect the worst. Then you were braced for it if it occurred, and pleasantly surprised if it didn't. My mother's strategies involved escaping into a book or focusing small and trying to make at least a few good things happen out of bad ones, even if it just meant getting the dishes done while you were waiting for bad news. My husband's family taught him to look at the time (or season, if it is somehting long) and say, "Well, by 3 o'clock it will be over and I can pick up the pieces and move forward." This is especially useful for things like dentist appointments or long illnesses. They taught him to always have a backup plan in case things didn't work out. I think these small coping skills are important. Teaching them also teaches that bad things do happen to everyone, and everyone gets through them and continues on. It sort of changes the expectations.

 

-Nan, now going off to make sure I haven't forgotten to teach my own children these things. Suddenly they seem much less trivial than they did.

[Rhondabee]

I have "perfect" parents. They've never made a wrong decision. They've never disagreed. (I have honestly never heard them raise their voices ever.) They've never wasted money, or been taken in by a scam. They've never shared any of their "real" lives with me.

 

(OH, my, is it any wonder that I - who obviously inherited my grandparents' rather Bohemian-esque genes - must psyche myself out for two days before every visit, or risk being in tears for two days afterwards? Any wonder I have always felt I must hide my real self from them?)

 

BTW - I know from other family members that both my parents grew up in alcoholic households w/blatant adultery issues, so obviously they took great care in "protecting" me. Yet, I felt (feel) very "unled" growing up, if that makes sense.

 

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, there's my dh's parents (now divorced), who were (are?) *so* very dysfunctional - exposing their kids to stuff they should never have been exposed to. Who still lie and distort everything to suit their own purposes. But, whose children could tell them ANYTHING (and I mean, ANYTHING), and know they would still be loved and accepted.

 

So, we in our parenting are trying to reach some magical balance - striving to show them our true inner selves and our struggles, trying to show them unconditional acceptance, and yet guiding and protecting them rather than forcing them to fend for themselves along the way. In a word, we are trying to be transparent.

 

It is very humbling to be completely honest with my kids, and I'm not certain that will bring them to a place of self-confidence and resilience. Your post was so very encouraging. Your parents sound as if they were truly transparent, and I thank you for sharing such personal thoughts here.

 

Rhondabee

[Nissi]

I was sent to boarding school at the age of 7 in another country, and as a result began a relationship with God who I was told was the only person who would never leave you. These conversations I had in private with God and the impressions I received when I faced decisions that were difficult helped me to survive and thrive the years of childhood and adolescence. I don't think I would have become a sane adult if it hadn't been for these question and answer sessions or prayer times with God. I struggle at present to help my children develop this relationship with God which came so easily to me in childhood. One of my dc seems more inclined or spiritually sensitive than the other and this has helped him to be more resilient than the one who is not. So helping children to meditate, reflect, and learn to receive wisdom from above is very important. Perhaps it is more important for some than others.

HTH!

Nissi

[Hannah C.]

As a college student, I think this article is interesting.

 

First of all, I find some of the comments made about students worrying about drinking too much on spring break or thinking they should cut back on partying a bit iffy. If you think you're going to drink too much on spring break, maybe you should make sure you don't! In fact, maybe you shouldn't be drinking at all; it's probably illegal! If you are spending all your time partying instead of studying and then you get stressed out about tests, that's your fault. You are making the choices and you can live with them.

 

I do understand stress about courses, especially during times like midterm or finals week. Those are the only times I have truly been stressed in college, actually, along with the night before my first test with a professor. The rest of the time I've been able to deal with the work with a minimal amount of stress, because I will be able to get it all done if I use my time wisely. Time management and self-control are very important in college. I'm not sure exactly how common these things are among college students, though.