Managing Stress and Distress: How to Help, Understand and Support Children and Young People

Part of the How to Help series of books exploring issues commonly faced by children and young people at home and in school, Managing Stress and Distress offers an accessible introduction to how heightened stress levels in young people can lead to distressed behaviour - and how to manage both. We have left behind a time when schools found it easier to exclude difficult children than understand them, but the evolutionary and psychological factors that often underpin stress responses and their resulting problematic behaviours remain poorly understood.

Offering a complete, compassionate guide to what stress is, how it arises, the purpose it serves and the issues it can cause, Stan Godek argues for a trauma-informed approach of managing short-term distress while also reducing long-term stress levels via a regular practice of mindfulness - and shows how parents, carers, teachers and schools can help.

Managing Stress and Distress is for parents and carers; teachers, teaching assistants, early years practitioners, educational psychologists, school senior management teams and other education professionals; support groups; youth workers, group leaders and others interested in the wellbeing and socio-emotional development of children and young people.

Table of Contents

Series Preface

About the Author

Authors Preface

How to Use This Book

Part 1: Introduction

1. What is stress?
2. A brief history of stress and distress
3. A psychological perspective
4. Neuroscience; Ten key things to know about stress and distress

Part 2: Stress and the brain

5. Key components of the brain

6. The HPA and stress chemicals

7. The negative impact of stress

8. Elizabeth Blackburn and the Telomere Effect

Part 3: Distress

9. The attachment process

10.The arousal response cycle

11. Emotional regulation or containment

12. Empathetic attunement, the secure base and exploratory behaviour

13. Internal working model

14. Distress and insecure attachment styles

Part 4: Managing distress

15. The arousal cycle

16. How to help at each stage

17. Nonverbal communication

18. Recovery and post-crisis

19. Analysis of incidents and looking after ourselves

Part 5: Stress and stages of development

20. Erikson’s stages of development

21. Pre-school to primary transition

22. Adolescence

23. Neuroplasticity

Part 6: Stress reduction

24. Chemicals again!

25. Mindfulness

26. Meditation

27. Breathing and breathing exercises

28. Imaging and visualisation

29. Shinrin-Yoku and Two Schools

Part 7: Conclusion

30. Summary

31. A last word to parents and carers

32. A last word to teachers and schools