Shimbo Pastory
This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania, on 30th November, 2021.
The psychological and psychosocial well-being of children is one of the things that are least taken care of in many parts of the world. It is for this reason that we are often not able to establish what exactly children go through, what they are made to harbour, what they carry along as they grow up, and what is invested in their future life.
Homes, schools and other co-parenting faculties ought to monitor so closely what happens to children in their care. Just like adults, children are also affected by stressful situations. Their absorption is however considerably higher than adults as they are oftentimes not directly accountable for their well-being or that of others.
Most causes of these societal stresses or what we call ‘stressors’ are historical, systemic or structural. By this we mean they have roots or/and link with the history of the people, or are out of customary norms. Some arise from the religious onus as well as societal transition periods. Doctors try to probe into some of these realities when they do patient history taking.
Structural Stressors
Regardless of age, childhood is generally taken as the time for orientation for later adult life. As such the family, religion, school, and society in general, all join hands together to help acquaint the young one with as much awareness and skills as possible.
The family base becomes a stressor to a child when there is vulgarity among parents or guardians, verbal abuse, drunkenness, physical and sexual and sexualized harassment, taking advantage, abuse, humiliation and torture, gender-based violence, deliberate denial of basic needs, threats of death, terrorization using weapons, as well as intrusion into a child’s privacy.
The school becomes a stressor when things are patterned in an undesirable way. Excessive punishments, excessive demands, pre-judgements, discrimination, abuses, injustice, publicly displayed prejudices, threats, taking advantage, denial of airing opinions, bullying, unstructured time, and change in routines, suppression, and overload of homework can all make a child unhappy and stressed.
It is good to note that stress in this context has nothing to do with the standard of living because children adapt to the real situations they find themselves in. A child can grow up in a well-to-do family and yet develop terrible anxieties.
What are the results?
Stress in childhood can have several impacts, some of which can hardly be fixed. For instance, a happy marriage is almost inconceivable in the mind of a girl child who grows up seeing her mother being beaten up or verbally harassed by her father.
Children who live in stressful environments find it difficult to make meaningful use of their talents. They do not have a chance of discovering them as their minds are preoccupied with anxiety and fears of possible harm all around them. This has a lasting impact on their adult life.
Also, stressors contribute a lot to poor performance of duties and school work. This is due to diminished attentiveness, and incapacitation of the assisting learning faculties and memory. Dominated by worries, instructions don’t stick to their minds and details easily bypass them. They count themselves losers, and as a result, they become negligent, considering all making efforts as worthless.
Stress has an impact on the way children value family bonds, relationships, ties, affiliations and friendships. There is always a mark left behind without which things would have been much better. This narrows down the circle of social interactions and also minimizes the possibility of forming positive and lasting associations with other people.
What can be done?
It is time for parents, guardians and teachers to be aware that children can also fall into stress. Mostly stress is due to puzzling situations they do not understand, and also questions they do not get answers to. Some of these things can be avoided by a change of behaviour and can be resolved with the help of experts in counselling and psychology.
Norms and practices that prove heroism yet at the receiving end work to degrade dignity should be spoken against and stopped. Not every historical practice is a value; there is always a need to examine the practices of the past and weigh them against the values and moral conventions of the present. This does not at all mean compromising the past.
What are we preventing?
By not making the younger generation grow up in anxiety and stress we are collectively forming a positive future society. We are minimizing errors of history from being repeated ever and ever again. We are curtailing numbers of distressed young adults who in adulthood might seek refuge in drugs, drunkenness, crime, or even suicide.
We are preventing the formation of dysfunctional families with domestic abuse, domestic violence, and gender-based violence. We are helping children learn to control spurts of fierce emotions and to develop and exercise self-control. Children deserve a stress-free environment for the good of the entire human society.
