Childhood Stress and Depression
While surfing between daily events now-a-days, do you ever uncover yourself longing if you could bring back the happy-go-lucky days of childhood? Children have no worries at all. They do not have to bother about paying bills or about any liabilities to meet. They do not have to face daily stresses that we adult need to face. But, is childhood truly a time of happiness? The fact is, childhood is actually far from being without stress and depression.
Environmental Factors
Children may experience several difficulties that they are not enough capable of coping up with emotionally such as divorce in parents, financial disruption, learning disabilities, physical or sexual abuse, being neglected just to name a few. Children by default find them helpless and experience intense feeling of stress and depression, leading to experience negative perspective of life events well into adulthood. Additionally, academic stress and peer interaction may also contribute significantly in experiencing stress and depression in a child.
Biological Vulnerability
Children may suffer from inherited tendency for stress and depression. It is typically caused by the chemical imbalance occurring in the brain. In most of the cases, parents may lack awareness about child's stress and depression and they practically underestimate the condition attributing as a natural event during developmental phase. But the experience of childhood stress and depression is not different from that of adults. It may severely affect the world perception of a child and make it profoundly distorted.
Consequences
As a result of childhood stress and depression, a child may feel distressed. Prolonged experience of stress may lead to experience apparent mood disorders and other psychological and physical disorders as similar as adults do. The child may feel hopeless, frustrated, unloved and anxious. This may also affect the child's self esteem negatively and lead him to experience low self esteem and a decline in academic performance as well. The childhood stress and depression may also cause a child to perceive the life in a confined regime, in which they are simply bound to follow a monotonous life cycle.
Role of Adults
In order to help a child with stress and depression, the first important step that you can take as a parent or a teacher is to gain adequate knowledge about this problem. It is only if you have sufficient awareness regarding childhood stress and depression, you could be able to realize the depressed child and be able to promptly seek out help following the signs and symptoms of stress and depression in the child.
