Look for These Symptoms
Physical symptoms. Children most commonly experience stomach aches and head aches. Anxiety symptoms like heart palpitations or sweating can occur.
When I walk my dog in the mornings, she is hyper vigilant, watching for a quail or a rabbit and always turning over her shoulder to check things out. Our children’s animal nature for survival causes them to be hyper vigilant, creating a chronic stress condition.
Sleeping and eating patterns may change, and breathing patterns become shallow, short, and labored under stress.
Stress weakens the immune system and cold symptoms, low-grade fevers, and low vitality indicate children have moved from stress to distress.
Emotional and Mental Symptoms. Children, like adults, will feel numbed after trauma or tragedy. Without respite, numbness turns to dissociation, which is a normal coping strategy when things seem overwhelming. You’ll know if dissociation goes too far when children daydream for long periods, gaze into nothingness, stay glued to the television, seem mindless, or bury themselves in an activity for what seems longer than normal.
Other mental states like excessive worry or depression can easily follow distress and prolonged tension. Irritability, inability to concentrate, and forgetfulness are signs that the trauma is still impacting the mind and the body.
Look for aftershocks. As time goes on and your family life returns to normal, you may witness:
Explosive tempers
Quiet withdrawal
Recurring nightmares
The psychosomatic tummy or headache
A constant nagging irritability
These are normal. Children’s reactions to trauma become part of their emotional memories. A television show or scene, a harsh word, a piece of music, can trigger the memory and the stress symptoms recur.
What really matters is how an individual child reacts to stress. Some children rise to the challenges of life, while others are more sensitive and withdrawn. Overall, children are more susceptible than adults because their bodies and emotions are still developing. Their brain reacts differently to stress than a mature brain. A child’s body is not designed to endure prolonged trauma or stress. And the old belief that children don’t feel pain and won’t remember is a falsehood. Every trauma and stress becomes an implicit memory in our nervous systems and cells.
First and foremost, a child’s needs are for two things: feeling safe and having a routine. Having a routine can be as simple as continuing to walk the dog or eating the same meal together. All of the suggestions listed below relieve stress in the body, help to prevent disease, and enable children to feel safe on the inside, when we can’t control the outside. Giving children the ability to make a choice about their feelings restores some sense of control in an overwhelming world.
Caron Goode’s (EdD) insights are drawn from her fifteen years in private psychotherapy practice and thirty years of experience in the fields of education, personal empowerment, and health and wellness. She is the author of eight books (www.inspiredparenting.net ) and the founder of the Academy for Coaching Parents,(www.acpi.biz) a training program for parents & professionals who wish to mentor other parents. A mom and step-mom, she and her husband live in Whitney, Texas. Reach her at caronbgoode@inspiredparenting.net.
