Stress has gotten a bad name.
Stress has become a buzzword in this country. People complain of "being stressed" on the job and at home. They speak in a general manner of the stress of everyday life as it involves work, traffic, shopping, kids, and money among the many hassles they experience. All this talk of stress as though it were an unequivocally bad thing overlooks the positive aspects of stress.
The stress that we experience as we go through our lives is of two types: chronic, unrelenting demand or acute, short-lived stress. It is the first type that has negative effects for people. Long-term, unremitting stress adversely affects our health in physical, emotional, and psychological ways. Acute stress, however, that flows from the situations that arise in all of our lives is inescapable and not damaging.
When it comes to your children, the goal is not to have them avoid stress. Learning to problem-solve their way through the demands and stresses of daily living is one of life's great lessons. Your goal should be to help them learn to manage the stress so that they may gain the satisfaction and sense of self-worth that comes from successfully meeting and overcoming adversity.
Here is one way to accomplish this: see to it that your kids are regularly stressed physically. The physiological reactions to physical exertion--rapid breathing, accelerated heart rate, perspiring--precisely mimic the reactions to psychological stressors. So experiencing physical stress through exercise or mowing the lawn or riding their bike to school amounts to rehearsal for handling psychological stress.
Completing a difficult homework assignment with strict time demands will stress your children, but in a good way. They will learn how to attack a problem, persevere through frustration, manage time, and feel a sense of satisfaction at a job well-done once the assignment is finished.
So, stress is not to be avoided. Rather, give your children the opportunity to learn that they can make it through stressful times by addressing the stressor and, with the support of their parents and others, meet the challenge.