Child Stress: Symptoms and Treatment

Child stress management applies and is differentiated from childhood anxiety when the expectations for the child are excessive. This child may be a prodigy, an athlete playing on multiple teams, a child of someone in the public spotlight or a child who themselves is in the spotlight. It may just as easily be the child living between two divorced parents homes or the child from the city who is now living in the suburbs. In any event, the symptoms occur as a result of the child’s difficulty in responding to the environmental expectations. Counseling for this child occurs as a combination of assisting the child to develop strategies to enhance their behavior or to assist the child into accepting themselves and their level of performance as it occurs. The outcome of treatment also frequently involves working with the adults in the child’s life to decrease unreasonable expectations. This decrease in expectations frequently results in an improved performance on the part of a child.