If you read the Soulful Parenting blog entry immediately preceding this one you will see the results of our recent survey of over a thousand Indiana teenagers. The survey asked teens to tell us what their stresses were and how they coped with these stresses. The results were similar, in most ways, with the findings of national surveys of adolescents and their stresses.
However, our study did have an interesting finding that we have not seen before and which speaks to what parents can do to encourage better coping for their teens. Our Soulful Parenting survey showed that as teens mature their coping strategies change in ways that leave them less effective in dealing with the increasing demands of young adulthood.
We found that young women, as they mature, continue to use healthy coping strategies such as talking about their stresses but they become less physically active. Younger (high school freshman and sophomores) girls report that they used exercise as a primary coping strategy. The consequence of not having a physical outlet is that the stresses that the older teenaged girls were dealing with were less effectively managed and these young women reported experiencing increasing somatization (channeling their stress into physical complaints).
The young women we surveyed were many times more likely to report stomach problems, headaches, sleep disruption, changes in eating, increased anxiety and depression and fatigue. Simply stated, the decreased effectiveness in coping was being channeled into physical ailments.
Young men, on the other hand, continue to be very physically active but demonstrated a significant decrease in the likelihood of talking about their problems in order to better cope. Some of this may be biologically mitigated, as we now know of the detrimental effects of testosterone on a young man’s communication centers.
The apparent result of the teenage boys decreased verbal expression of stress is an increased likelihood of self-defeating and self-destructive acting out. Of course, another effect of testosterone is increased risking taking and aggressiveness. There is no shortage of activity as a stress release in the young man but there is a drop in verbalization of stress.
The results of this survey clearly demonstrate that teens do change coping styles as they mature and in many cases the change is to less effective, even destructive strategies. Parents and other adults in the young woman’s world need to encourage her to continue to express herself verbally but also maintain physical exercise as a coping strategy. She must have multiple outlets so she is less likely to somatize.
We must encourage young men to find ways to communicate about their stresses. They will deal with stress with physical activity but they need other methods of coping and the one that they seem to abandon between their freshman and senior years of high school is talking. Any increased verbal communication would likely bleed some of the stress that gets channeled to self-defeating and self-destructive acting out behavior.
Of course these results may offer insight to Soulful Parents about not only their teens coping strategies but also about their own. Fathers, do you deal with your stress by verbally expressing yourself? Mothers, have you stayed physically active? Take an inventory of your own coping style and model better coping mechanisms for your teens.
Remember, life is inherently stressful. The challenge for each of us is to develop coping skills that help us feel empowered and grow into more mature people. Substance abuse, somatizing, dangerous and aggressive acting out, premature and meaningless sexual activity and many other adolescent behaviors are unhealthy and inappropriate coping strategies.
We want our teens to have healthy coping mechanisms. Teach them to talk with family and friends, to write a journal, to exercise, to pray, to listen to music, to read, to develop a hobby, to do anything that encourages growth and does not have the potential of becoming self-defeating or self-destructive. And while you are at it, do it for your self. Make healthy coping a family affair.