CADV 450
19 January 2014
Stress and Coping in Relation to School Stress stimuli can be presented in almost any situation and carry on into other situations. Stress can interfere with a lot in a person’s life and come can come from and/or affect one’s health, happiness, education, the list goes on. What is important is learning how to deal with those stress factors. This is where coping strategies come in. In our online class, we spoke about coping and stress from a Child Life Specialist point of view. One of the goals of a CLS is to make a situation that is stressful easier to cope with. This is important for teachers as well. One of a teacher’s main goal is to provide the appropriate tools for students to help them learn new things. As observers, teacher should be able to recognize stress stimuli and help students cope with their stress so that it does not interfere with their schoolwork. In my paper, I will focus on and provide examples of stress displayed in school settings that ultimately affect one’s ability to focus on the curriculum and ways to cope with those stressors. Then I will reflect on what I have learned and why this topic is important to me. This topic is interesting to me because I plan to become a teacher and I believe that having the ability to cope with stressors is a powerful tool to have in life. A huge percent of children in the United States have divorced parents. For children, divorce can create confusion, anger, sadness, etc. According to the findings of Clarke-Stewart (2000), “the most significant difference between children from non-intact families and children from two-parent households was cognitive performance, in which children with divorced parents scored much lower”. Also, “children from divorced families are two to three times more likely to drop out of school than children from intact families” (Kelly & Emery, 2003) and “children in stepfamily homes are twice as likely to have psychological, behavioral, social, and academic problems than are children in nondivorced families” (Kelly & Emery, 2003). In addition to the divorce itself, children also are affected by “factors coinciding with divorce such as socioeconomic status and available external support” (Clarke-Stewart et al., 2000). I believe that the struggle is school that children display is a result of the inability to concentrate due to many concerns the child may have regarding the divorce. So, in order to help the child cope with the stress, one must target the source of stress. The source of stress can come from many things that happen in divorced families. For example, hostility between parents can make children feel like they have to take sides or the child/adolescent may not be able to accept the divorce because they don’t understand it. It would be ideal if parents kept their children out as much as possible. If I were a teacher and had the chance to speak to a parent about the effects of his/her divorce on the child’s education, I’d suggest that the parent be appropriately open as possible. I would be lucky to be able to tell that to a parent who hasn’t told their child about the divorce yet because I believe it is important to talk about everything with the child before it begins to happen in order to avoid confusion and giving the child the opportunity to prepare to cope without being caught off guard. Address their concerns and reassure them of things like their ability to still see each parent (hopefully that is the case). Talking about why divorce was chosen as the best decision, reassuring the child that he/she is not alone and there are other families who sadly have to go through divorce and also reassuring that the child did not cause the divorce are great conversation topics. As I learned this winter semester, play can be used as a way to get children to express their feelings in order to be able to initiate a discussion. Sometimes talking isn’t as easy for a younger child. There are also a lot of children’s books on divorce that might help. According to Child Development Specialist, Karen DeBord, Ph.D., Child, “most counselors say that children who cope best with divorce are those who, after divorce, continue to have a stable, loving relationship with both parents and regular, dependable visits from the nonresidential parent”. Sometimes, this opportunity is out of the question for children, and they have to learn to cope without this blessing. In some cases, children are raised by a single parent and might feel sadness because they don’t have a “normal” family. Children should learn to deal with their unique family and know that every family has their problems. The child should be directed into a more positive outlook on their situation, such as they fun they still might have with crazy uncles at family parties. I believe it is important that the child has someone close and caring to talk to. There are also a lot of support groups and programs out there that will help children be able to cope and help them find answers to their questions. If children’s concerns are addressed, I believe they are more likely to be able to concentrate in school. Another source of stress present in schools is frustration due to the difficulty in trying to understand a subject or complete a task. In A Mind at a Time, Mel Levine talks about the 8 neurodevelopmental systems in the brain.
“Approximately 30 trillion synapses…exist within the human brain. That crowded network allows for plenty of strong connections, disconnections, and misconnections….As we have seen, designated teams of neurodevelopmental functions join together to enable kids to acquire specific abilities. When one or more members of a team fail to show up or fail to do their share, performance suffers. Such negative results can bring on a backlash of emotional and motivational complications. Fortunately, we have the wherewithal and the knowledge to mend these problems before they get out of hand” (Levine 30).
Basically, Levine is saying that children have different strengths and different weaknesses. Children can always improve weaknesses, or learn strategies to make a task easier for them. Although, It might be harder for others because of their neurodevelopmental profile they were born with. For example, a child might find math very stressful. There are many possible reasons why this child would find math stressful and it is important to explore those reasons in order to target the source of stress. One reason might be due to the fact that math requires a lot of writing. Perhaps the child is actually great in math, but his/her skills are being covered by the difficulty in graphomotor skills. The child might have an awkward pencil grip, making the child hate writing because it feels uncomfortable, or the child might have difficulty multitasking between writing down the problem while remember how to do it. Another possible reason might be that the child has a weakness in higher sequential thinking, which requires a step-by-step method to solve the problem. Math problems that involve higher sequential thinking might look like this: “Lisa has 10 marbles. Sam has 3 more than Lisa. Lisa gives 5 marbles to Sam. How many marbles does Lisa have now?” or “What number comes next? 2, 4, 16, __”. Maybe the problem comes from the inability to pay attention. There are many accommodations than can be provided for children to make whatever they are stressing about easier to deal with. In the case of a child who has trouble paying attention, it would be reasonable to eliminate anything distractors in the room. Perhaps the child would work better with the door closed. Manipulatives can also be used to gain a child’s attention in solving math problems. Colorful blocks used to count might make it more fun for a child to do math, relieving the child of stress. The implementation of dance programs with math integration might be ideal for students who have better gross motor skills than fine motor skills. There are many different ways dancing can be combined with math to make learning math a bit easier. When working with children who struggle with higher order thinking, helping them learn to break down problems into small, organized steps will help them in the long run. I have learned so much from CADV 450 during this winter break. Although I am not currently pursuing a career as a Child Life Specialist, I have learned so much that I believe will help me as a future special education teacher. Our first main focus was on the importance of play. I always knew play had some developmental benefits, but I didn’t know just how important play was until participating in the discussions and checking out the readings on Moodle. Later on, as teacher, I will know to not only put my focus on academics, but play as well because it provides cognitive benefits. Play also serves as a great environment for assessment of a child when it is needed. It might be needed to check the cognitive level of a child who might be a candidate for special education. It can be used to allow a child to express feelings, or to even check a child’s proficiency in a certain subject. The discussion of play has also sparked the ideas of implementing different types of play with academics. Children enjoy play, and the implementation of some sort of play might make learning more fun. Secondly, I learned a lot about the importance of addressing stress and ways to cope. Addressing stress is important for a child because not only does it make a situation easier for, say a doctor or a teacher, it makes a child feel more comfortable. We must not think about the goal itself (which might be to give a child a shot or teach them to be able to add on their own) because that would be selfish and it is not enough to reach the goal. It is important to make children feel comfortable as it will teach them to be able to cope when the certain situation comes up again in life. I learned about the different ways to asses the child to figure out the best type of way to provide coping skills. I also learned about the many different ways to help a child cope. There is a lot more ways than I would have ever imagined. I learned about so many ways to integrate things such as books and videos into helping a child prepare for a stressor and prepare to cope.
Stress and coping is an important topic to me because I feel that stress is inevitable, but there are ways to learn how to make the stress easier to deal with. I believe that happiness is the most important thing in life. It is important to teach children to find happiness in even the most difficult situations in order to avoid negative outcomes, such as the inability to express anger appropriately, in the future. As a future teacher, I will do my best to be the best observer of my students and help provide them with great ways to overcome tough times.

References

Clarke-Stewart, K. A., Vandell, D. L., McCartney, K., Owen, M. T., & Booth, C. (2000). Effects of parental separation and divorce on very young children. Journal of Family
Psychology, 14(2), 304-326.

DeBord, K. (n.d.). The Effects of Divorce on Children. NCSU. Retrieved January 19, 2014, from http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/fcs/pdfs/fcs471.pdf 
 Kelly, J.B. & Emery, R.E. (2003). Children's adjustment following divorce: Risk and resilience perspectives. Family Relations, 52(4), 352-362. Levine, M. D. (2002). A mind at a time. New York: Simon & Schuster.