Dear Soulful Parents-
We recently surveyed over 1,000 central Indiana teens to better understand their stresses and how they cope. We thought you’d be interested in the findings.
These teens are most concerned about their grades, relationships with parents/family, relationships with friends and extracurricular activities; in that order. These results are consistent with larger, national surveys of teen’s stresses.
Interesting new findings, specific to our survey, show how teen’s cope with their stress. Generally, there are two ways to cope: passively and actively. Passive coping includes sleeping, reading, listening to music, etc. Active coping is exercising, talking with friends, making a plan for solving their problems, etc.
There are significant differences in how our surveyed males and females cope. Half of the high school girls we surveyed, ages 14 to 19, said they deal with stress in passive ways. The other half, of course, report that they are active in their coping style. Thirty-four percent are positive active; that is, they exercise, or talk with friends to relieve stress. But, sixteen percent are self-defeating active — they fight, yell at friends and family, drink, destroy things, cut themselves, etc.
Teenage boys, on the other hand, employ passive strategies only 23% of the time and active 77% of the time. Of the 77%, 28% of the time they engage in self-defeating or self-destructive acting out. Forty-nine percent employ positive acting out (exercise, talking, etc.) We are encouraged by the latter, but concerned about the more than one-quarter of the teen boys who are self-defeating and/or self-destructive in their coping.
What are your kids’ top three stresses? How do they and their friends cope?
As always, keep up the good fight. Your teens are worth it! Relate, relate, relate!
Be Soulful. And be Thankful.