* Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars *

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Stress

What is stress? Many peoples say stress is a motivation to prompt a person to perform better. So is stress good or bad?

In my opinion, at a certain level of stress, it's good. In 1908, Doctors R. M. Yerkes and J. D. Dodson in the United States said that, 'an optimal level of stress is needed to improve performance in whatever task one does.' As there is no such thing as a stress-free life and doctors say some stress is actually useful and positive, whether in children or in adults. But if beyond the optimal level, it will become distress, which is 'bad' stress.

'Bad' stress lead to many negative problems. A doctor had once given an example of 'bad' stress. He explained, 'Imagine the strings of a violin or guitar. If they are too loose, you can't play. You have to tighten it to make music. But if you tighten it too much, the strings will snap. That is how everyone responds to stress' When a person is distress, it will affect he mental health and he may even commit suicide. Researches have been shown that, there have been more and more cases of primary school children committing suicide these few years. Therefore I think that it’s bad when stress has when become the optimal level.

There are many factors leading to a person's distress. The main factor of being distress is from parents and school. One voluntary child counsellor, who declines to give her name, says: 'Parents also sometimes put their kids on a guilt trip about how their lack of performance shames the family and about how the child doesn't seem to be performing despite the love he gets.' It is true. Many of the parents want their children to achieve good result and perform well in everything; to make them will feel proud. Therefore they buy assessment books for their children to practice, hire tuition teachers, and sign up enrichment courses for them. They do all these to push and force the children, but they neglected their children ability to cope with all these. As different children are given some leeway to develop at their own pace. The children are forced to accept stress as part of life and they try to keep up with the Tans with the help of private tuition, assessment books and dollops of pressure. Soon the children will just 'breakdown' and give up, when it is happen it is very hard to get them back.

In order to prevent this parent should communicate, encourage and care more about their children. Taking notices of their behavior, include whether a child has appeared worried, quiet, unhappy and tearful of late and whether he complains of aches and pains. They should not give their children excess pressure to achieve want they want their children to achieve. As everyone has different abilities and different pace of understanding and learning.

Twinkled @ [ 2/04/2006 03:29:00 PM ]

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