How to Help Teenagers Embrace Stress
Stretching beyond familiar limits doesn’t always feel good, but growing and learning — the keys to school and much of life — can’t happen any other way.
I can’t get the link to work past the paid subscription, so I’ll post the full article here.
Getty ImagesAs teachers, I don’t think we can ever give an assessment or offer feedback on some work without feeling that we are contributing to the stress in our students’ lives, so I always feel responsible for adding to the anxiety we hear so much about. When I saw this article in the NY Times, I was comforted by some of their statements:
“But the conventional wisdom is that stress does harm and so, accordingly, we should aim to reduce, prevent or avoid it. Not surprisingly, this negative slant on stress can shape parenting and also leave teenagers feeling stressed about being stressed.
“Especially within the last five years,” says Sarah Huss, the director of human development and parent education at Campbell Hall School in Los Angeles, “we’ve seen a rise in the number of parents who feel that it’s their job to rescue their child from situations that are stressful.”
To reframe how we think about a phenomenon that has been roundly, and wrongly, pathologized, we should appreciate that healthy stress is inevitable when we operate at the edge of our abilities. Stretching beyond familiar limits doesn’t always feel good, but growing and learning — the keys to school and much of life — can’t happen any other way.
According to Jeremy P. Jamieson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies how stress impacts emotions and performance, “Avoiding stress doesn’t work and is often not possible. To achieve and grow, we have to get outside our comfort zones and approach challenges.”
I don’t think the article offers all the answers we are searching for, but at least it gives a perspective to consider that productive stress doesn’t have to result in harmful anxiety. Has anyone read the book by the article’s author?
Lisa Damour (@LDamour) is a psychologist in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the author of “Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood” and the forthcoming “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls.”
Her new book that’s coming out might be a good one for us.