Consequences of Stress on Children's Development

In this assignment, we were asked to choose one stressor that someone I know, experienced as a child. I will share how they coped or compensated for that stressor.

The stressor that I chose was poverty. She was a single parent of young children and living in low income housing and getting government assistance. Her daughter coped with this stressor by doing the best that she could in school for a while but after suffering through getting teased and made fun of at school she became a child of the very opposite that she used to be. She started getting in trouble for not doing her homework and being the class clown. This was her way of getting positive attention at school that was not paying off and would not reap good results for her future. Her mother was so busy at work that she hardly noticed that she was having such problems at the school and with her peers. The mother learned of her behavior and she realized that she had to make a change. She got back in school herself and sent her children off for one year to live with the grandmother, someone who could give them what they needed at the time while she got on her feet. The new lifestyle and school (environment) and the attention that her grandmother now showed her, got her back on the right track and she became the student that she had the potential to become all the time.

After about a year, when the mother had got on her feet, she went to get her children and learned how to become the mother she needed to be for her children and she had conquered living in poverty by going on and getting her education to make a better life for her and her children.

Her children did not know at the time that their mother had fallen into a deep depression due to the poverty that she and her children were living. This is normal for a parent living in a condition where they are not able to provide and give their children the life they deserve.

Low-income mothers of young children are at high risk for depression because of their sex, their low socioeconomic status, and their status as parents of young children. Furthermore, parental depression may increase the risk of disturbances in social, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physical functioning among children. Little is known about the life circumstances and experiences associated with poor mental health. A present study investigated the relationships of social supports and everyday stressors to maternal depressive symptoms in a group of predominantly low-income mothers of young children, in an effort to
delineate the life conditions associated with psychological distress among this high-risk group (Dohrenwend, 1069).

Many researchers have addressed the concept of social support in terms of the quantity of support available.
However, an individual's perception of the quality of social support may be more important than the amount of support. Thus, it was hypothesized that the quality of primary intimate relationships would be more strongly associated with depressive symptoms than the amount of interaction with the social network (Moss, 1977).

I chose to research Africa and the stressors that children there experience. I found that in the past ten years, there has been increasing recognition that children who have been exposed to traumatic events can, like trauma exposed adults, develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Practitioners therefore need to be able to recognize and treat post-traumatic stress reactions in children. However, the direct application of adult diagnostic criteria for PTSD can result in the misdiagnosis of post-traumatic stress reactions in children, while research has only recently begun to investigate the effectiveness of different treatments for children with PTSD. The need for more systematic research on the management of PTSD in children is noted. At this time, they are researching and trying to decrease the amount of traumatic events to decrease the rate of children getting PTSD in Africa.

Since not all children (or adults) who experience a trauma will go on to develop PTSD, identification of etiological mechanisms and risk factors for development of the disorder has been an important recent thrust in PTSD research.There is some evidence that, as for adults, the risk of PTSD in children increases with physical proximity to the trauma and previous trauma exposure, and (due to biological and/or socio-cultural factors) may be greater for girls than for boys. Additionally, for children, parental trauma-related distress increases the risk of developing PTSD, since it affects the parent's capacity to create a post-trauma climate of safety and security and to emotionally contain the child's fear and anxiety. They are attempting cognitive-behavioral therapy in the cases that they diagnose PTSD now (Yule, 2010).

References:

Brown GW, Bhrolchain MN, Harris T: Social class and psychiatric disturbance among women in an urban population. Sociology 1975; 9:225-254.

Dohrenwend BS, Dohrenwend BP: Social Status and Psychological Disorders: A Causal Inquiry. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969.

Moss P, Plewis I: Mental distress in mothers of preschool children in Inner London. Psychol Med 1977; 7:641-652.

Yule W. Posttraumatic stress disorder in children and adolescents. Int Rev Psychiatry. 2010;13:194–200.