What Children Can Teach Us About Coping (And What We Can Teach Them)

Four Tips for Families Facing Stress

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The story is both ridiculously cute and deeply profound.

Jessica Martin, an art teacher at West Side Elementary School in Healdsburg, California, north of San Francisco, and her colleague, Asherah Weiss, a fellow artist, set up a hotline with students offering advice on how to cope with all the stress in the world these days.

“The pandemic, the war in Ukraine — it’s all still very raw, and we’ve never had the time to emotionally recover,” Martin told the New York Times this week. “But to hear the pure joy from kids is extremely comforting.”

After dialing 707-873-7862, callers are presented with a series of options: “If you’re feeling mad, frustrated, or nervous, press 1. If you need words of encouragement and life advice, press 2. If you need a peptoc from kindergarteners, press 3.” Callers are also offered the chance to “to hear kids laughing with delight” or listen to “encouragement in Spanish.”

At times in the last few weeks, the line has received up to 9,000 calls an hour. Some of the messages callers hear:

· Be grateful to yourself.

· Bro, you're looking great.

· If you’re feeling up high and unbalanced, think of groundhogs.

Add this story to a few others about children that have also gone viral of late—from the Ukrainian refugee singing “Let It Go” to the American schoolchildren writing about the pandemic—and it’s beginning to seem like children have more knowledge about how to cope with stress than the rest of us do.

Actually, they might.

The pandemic has produced a plethora of research about how parents and children can best respond to upheaval. Some of the best ideas come from the bottom up; others from the top down. Regardless, every family that I know can benefit from these ideas.

Here are four tips, based on these new studies, about how families can best cope with stress.

1. Move

One of the messages on the hotline is this: If you’re mad or frustrated, you can do what you want to do best. Or you can do flips on the trampoline.

Wise advice!

In a comprehensive review called “Children and Coping During Covid-19,” Mohamed Buheji of the International Institute of Inspiration Economy and three colleagues found that exercise has played a huge role in maintaining mental health during the pandemic. The researchers specifically mentioned aerobic exercise, biking, bodyweight training, dance, even active videogames. They might have added, for younger children, just running around.

Such exercises “counteract the side effects of a sedentary lifestyle,” Buheji and his colleagues write, "improve the immune system and fight diseases.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that “children and adolescents ages 6 through 17 years do 60 minutes (1 hour) or more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily.” Such regular physical activity has the added advantage, the CDC says, of reducing fat, creating stronger bones and muscles, and leading to higher academic performance.

2. Talk

One of the hotline messages: It's OK to be different.

Again, how wise.

For children and adults alike, allowing time to talk about your anxieties is key to emotional hygiene. Parents might feel reluctant to bring up topics they themselves are unsure about, but that reluctance sends the unwelcome message that talking about difficult subjects is unwelcome.

In a broad-based review of the literature on coping, Bruce Compas of Vanderbilt, and six colleagues, reviewed points of convergence on how best to regulate emotions. They found that emotional expression, what they define as “letting someone know how you are feeling,” is one of the biggest factors of successfully responding to difficult situations. By contrast, “The suppression of the expression of emotions in real-world settings has been linked with increases in negative emotions.”

Setting aside safe times and safe spaces for all members of the family to share their worries with one another, far from making those worries worse, will actually make them better. Parents don’t need to have all the answers. Just allowing children to voice their concerns and know that their parents are focused on their well-being strengthens everyone’s commitment to getting through the situation together.

3. Sleep

One of the hotline messages: If you're frustrated, you can always go to your bedroom, punch a pillow, or cry on it and just go scream outside.

Even better: Take a nap on that pillow.

The Buheji study reports that “Both adults’ and children’s sleep patterns can change in the face of social isolation situations.” The lack of a daily routine directly affects our biological clocks, causing daytime sleepiness and difficulties in falling asleep at night. For children, they say, this lack of regular sleep results in impaired growth and development “since growth hormones are produced throughout the night.” For adults, it results (among other things) in less patience when dealing with children.

Don’t doom scroll at bedtime; instead, listen to the children: punch your pillow and go to sleep.

4. Play

There’s one more hotline message that I love: Dude, live it up.

Dude, you're so right.

Research consistently shows that emotional well-being is fed by recovery. You can’t be healthy without a healthy dose of play. In a provocative paper called “Pretend Play, Coping, and Subjective Well-Being in Children,” Julie Ann Fiorelli and Sandra Russ of Case Western University argue e that one particular kind of play is especially effective in stressful situations: play-acting.

“Research consistently demonstrates that, through play, children develop cognitive and affective processes important for overall functioning,” they write. Pretend play, which they define as “the use of fantasy, make-believe, and symbolism,” is particularly helpful because it allows children to act out their feeling indirectly, using familiar situations or characters—like dolls or action figures—to work through unfamiliar feelings.

All of us are facing unfamiliar feelings these days. The worst thing any of us can do is keep those feelings bottled up.

Plus, if none of these ideas works, you can follow the advice of the children at West Side Elementary: If you’re nervous, go get your wallet and spend it on ice cream and shoes.

☀

Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through my other posts.

You might enjoy reading these posts:

What We Gained From The Pandemic

The One Thing You Shouldn't Do When You're Sad

What Would You Take If You Had to Flee Your Home?

Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.

Or, you can contact me directly.