Teen Stress - How Not To Handle it

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Teen Stress to Burnout: How Not to Handle Stress in Teenagers

Teen Stress & Parental Concerns

Photo: Martin Walls @ sxc.hu

These are not the best of times for parenting the teenagers. These are not the best of times for being teenagers either. The dice is loaded both ways.

Parents, as adults, have so many reasons to be stressed - about increasing expenditures, stress at job, insecurity about the future, and changing shapes of relationships during their lifetimes, etc.

Additionally, the parents of a teenager are worried about her well being in a society which is downright threatening and hazardous for a teen on the threshold of adulthood. They worry about her future. These days a child is expected to be outstanding in studies, excellent in sports, scintillating in social skills and an epitome of self confidence, to be able to achieve anything in life

The parents are rightly worried, and in their concern for the teenager, they engage her in so many activities, that oftentimes, the teenager is spending more time in acquiring these skills than she spends at the school or with her family and friends, culminating in high teenager stress.

The result? Burnout!

The adolescent looses interest in all these activities, looses enthusiasm in general, and looses interest in her studies. Parents, in their concern for her material success, kill the person inside the teenager.

Teen Stress: Symptom Or Malady?

Even if the teenager learns all the required skills and succeeds in life later on, becomes an expert at making the right move at the right time, he looses his real self along the way, and becomes less of a human and more of a machine: the necessary result of pursuing the goals of some one else, striving to become some one else, and living the dreams of someone else.

The success stories that parents and teenagers try to follow are of those who followed their own calling and followed it at all costs, even if it meant going against the grain of their times and societies. The real fulfillment in life, and real success as a corollary, comes by following one's inner voice and not by running after others' rainbows – however colorful they might be.

But, how can the teen stress be avoided?

No doubt, the adolescents need to be guided and goaded, they are to be steered clear of the harmful peer pressures, made aware of the hollowness behind the shimmering advertisements and fads and fashions: there is crying need of the hour that parents start seeing the teenager as a person in his own right, who has a right to be, and most probably is, a very different kind of person. They have to accept him so that it becomes easier for him to accept himself. This is the surest guard against child falling for the lure of faddish crazes and voguish trends.

You will meet many people who did what they were told, did quite well materially in their life, moved in the fast lane, and succeeded the way success is defined these days… but when the dust settled, depression set in: they started wondering – was it really what the life was meant for? Did they really live the life? In the race for getting ahead did they not forsake living for the sake of winning?

Keeping these live examples scattered everywhere in society, this is time to pause and think: Is teen stress a symptom or is it a malady?

What should parents do to manage teen stress?

What are the things that teenagers themselves should do to manage this inevitable conflict, stress and tension?

Further Reading

Back to HOME from Teen Stress to Burnout...

Reading Teenage Stress: A Guide To Their Parents

Teen Stress Management - A Guide to Parents & Teenagers

When Your Teen's Friends Give You Jitters: Things Every Parent Should Do

Further Reading