From chaos to calm, reducing your families stress in six easy steps.

You are reading this as you have just had the worst weekend, the kids keep fighting, you have a deadline at work, but you know you need to spend more time with family, your toddler has just had a tantrum in a shop, You know your child is becoming increasingly anxious as they don’t want to go to school. Do any of these sound familiar?

So let’s think about the science of stress and what you can do to regulate it. When we are stressed, your or your child’s body floods with stress hormones- adrenaline, cortisol etc. Your blood sugar rises, and your blood flow is redirected from non-essential systems to get your muscles ready for speed.
We call this a stress response. This is our body’s way of coping with feeling unsafe. It can be significant in a crisis (fight or flight), but unfortunately for most of us, if this response occurs often, we pay the price.

We know that stress increases our risk of disease, shortens our life, and our kid’s brain not being fully developed from birth can interfere with brain development and lead to anxiety states.

This probably sounds very worrying, but the good news is if you give your kids the right kind of care, they will thrive and flourish.

What can you do? Here are six tips to help right away.

1. Identify and minimise your stress

Work out what’s stressing you, and if you can, go and see a therapist who can try and help you.

Be a mind-minded parent …have an “authoritative” parenting style.

Many studies show that if you can empathise with your child and show them firm and consistent boundaries, this way of parenting can be a protective factor against stress.

2. Get social support

Having people around you who support you and make you feel confident and secure can protect you against stress. So being with a partner who does not support you does not help you or your children.

3. Good child/ teacher relationships

Having a teacher who understands our children can help spare them unnecessary stress; we all remember teachers that gave us a hard time, so if this is happening to your child, do try and go in and talk about it calmly.

4. Give your child a boost of Oxytocin

Oxytocin is the body’s natural love potion, helps couples fall in love, makes mothers bond with their babies, and encourages teams to work. Recent evidence shows that it can also help counterbalance the stress response. (Uvnas-Moberg,2004) You can stimulate it by giving your child/partner a massage; they even found that sitting in one of the massage chairs helped too, but hands work best and hugging everyone does help.

5. Night Night Sleep Tight

Having a  good night’s sleep is essential; sleep deprivation does not only make you tired, and it interferes with stress hormone production. Ordinarily, cortisol is high in the morning and then this graduates late throughout the day as melatonin takes over to help us get to sleep. If you skip the deep sleep cycle, you get more cortisol throughout the night, making it even harder to get to sleep. We all know that we are more irritable if we don’t sleep, but it is also more challenging for us to concentrate, which does not help our kids in school.

6. Tell your kids about stress and feelings/emotions

When I meet with parents and children and explain stress and its impact on our bodies and mind, parents are less angry as they understand their children. Most kids have an innate curiosity for knowledge and want to learn,  so here are some tips for talking about feelings. Try to wonder what the surface may be; it can help your child understand themselves emotionally. Even if you get it wrong, they will set you right.   If you are trying to model a feeling, try using words such as sometimes, I feel……avoid using language such as you always….all the time, you……If your child is directing anger at you, use phrases such as:

• I can see that you are angry at me, or  I am sorry you are mad at me; what can we do to improve this? Words like this can be very containing if your child is out of control.
• When they need to find the words for them, you could say, Do you feel……..when ……..happens. e.g., Do you feel angry when your brother takes the lego you wanted?
• Are you feeling frustrated because you want to stay up late? Do you feel sad because your sister is angry with you?