I ran my FW group last week on stress relief/reduction. My FW site is a transitional living facility for homeless families. During my intro I asked the children what stress was thinking that they would not know. I heard two answers that both surprised and saddened me. One child said that stress is when you are really sleepy but can't fall asleep and another child said stress is when her tummy hurts. No child should be so stressed out that they cannot sleep or have stomach aches.
Prior to beginning this FW our instructor sent us an attachment with statistics on homeless families. This got me thinking and I began to do a little research on my own. Here are just a handful of the statistics that I found: 21% of homeless children must repeat a grade due to absence, 42% attend 2 schools in one school year, 28% attend 3 or more (MISD). When I asked who had to switch schools almost everyone raised their hand. 10% report sexual abuse (this number is 3X higher than other children). I also found statistics on what leads a family to being homeless: 22% is due to domestic violence, 11% is due to eviction, 11% is due to family breakdown, 10% is financial difficulty and 11% is left for other reasons. 51.8% of single mothers are homeless due to domestic violence. These are staggering statistics! I can't help what wonder what these children have seen and/or experienced. Could you image having to go to school every day while worrying if you'll have a place to sleep, food to eat or whether your family will be safe that night? It is easy to pass these children off a "bad" but really I think they are all just seeking attention. I think that if we could look into their pasts we would be able to see why they do certain things that they do. I look at these children and wonder where they will be in 10-years. I hope that what we are doing will make some kind of difference. I want these children to grow up and be anything they want to be and have every opportunity that every other child has. Where they are living now is taking great steps to assure that this happens.
When I look at these children I see my child. If I didn't have the support of my family I could easily be in the same situation, anyone could. Before passing off a child as "bad" I think we all need to step back and consider what kind of grown-up stress a child may be going through/dealing with.
Here is one of the links for where I got my statistics from: http://www.misd.net/homeless/statistics.htm
I could not find the other websites that I used. I had previously recorded this information for my own personal use and did not cite the resources. I will update my blog once I find them
I have also attached a really great article on the effect of childhood stress. I think that everyone should take a look at it, especially the other members of my FW team.
This was a very interesting post. The statistics on how stress affects children are very sad but unfortunately not surprising. The lesson that I took from both this post and also the excellent article that linked from the title, was that children feel stress too, and this stress can be both physically and emotionally devastating.
ReplyDeleteI think that parents tend to be so focused on meeting a child's needs physically, buying them "things" like clothes, food and toys, that they tend to forget that the emotional needs of their child are equally important. Stress damages a child physiologically due to the release of stress hormones and the effects of this on the body, and stress interferes with brain development as well. But stress damages the psyche of children too. How many of the mental illnesses that we study are linked to some sort of neglect or mistreatment of the individual in childhood? As an example, Borderline Personality Disorder is clearly linked to a the failure of a person to develop trust as a small child. This is a clear failure on the part of the sufferers parent(s).
People need to become more aware of the emotional needs of children and take this responsibility more seriously. I can think of anything sadder than a child who isn't able to enjoy the innocence and happiness of just being a child...