Are Parents Clueless About Their Teens’ Stress?

The fact that today’s teens are stressed out shouldn’t be news to anyone, but according to a new study by the American Psychological Association (APA), many parents don’t realize the severity of the affects of stress on their kids.

Says the APA, “Parents’ responses about sources of stress for their children were out of sync with what children reported as sources of worry. In general, children also were more likely to report having experienced physical symptoms often associated with stress than parents were to say their children experienced these symptoms.”

For example:

• 42% of teens say they get stress-related headaches, while only 13% of parents say their teens get them
• 49% of teens say they have trouble sleeping due to stress, while only 13% of parents say this is the case
• 39% of teens say they eat too much or too little as result of stress, while only 8% of parents see this as a problem for their teens

So why are so many parents so out of the loop? An article in Psychology Today suggests that parents themselves are more stressed, and are therefore less able to see the stress in the people around them, including their own children.

In my book Chill, I talk about the importance of building a personal support system made up of people you know you can turn to when life gets particularly stressful. Ideally, parents would be a part of this system for any teen, but they first need to understand what’s really going on in their teen’s life.