Helping Your Kid Cope With College Stress

Students have a lot on their plate. They deal with homework, grades, part-time jobs, new relationships, etc. You can help your child cope with stress to make their lives better. 

Being a parent to a college student is not easy. Sending your child into a big and new world can be very stressful. Yet, it’s young people who are most under stress during this period.

Helping Your Kid Cope With College Stress

They have to tackle many new things on their own. Dealing with a heavy academic load, building new relationships, and setting future career goals, among many other things, are not easy.

However, that’s where you, as a parent, can step in to play. Help your child cope with stress while they are away studying. Here are some tips on how you can help students feel more at ease around their stresses. 

Find The Cause

First and foremost, as a parent, you should help your child narrow the cause of their problems. Sure, college life can be a difficult period. It does come with numerous complications, challenges, and, of course, stresses.

However, it’s not just a school that troubles them so much. Your child must have more specific reasons to be troubled. Find those reasons. By defining the cause, you will find a way to fight it and even avoid it in the future.

So, talk to your child. Ask the right questions. Most commonly, kids feel most stressed when under pressure. Sure, they’re afraid to fail in school. However, the roots of these fears start deeper than that.

They may fear all kinds of things, like failing in adult life, not being good enough, or disappointing you. Of course, delegating a part of the workload to writing services like the eduguide pro service will help with some of these stresses.

You Might Also Like: Calm In Chaos

Yet, sometimes, stress may not be related to school but something else, like family or personal relationships. Address these common stress factors to see why your child is so anxious. 

Create An Open Dialogue

Once you know the cause of your child’s stress, talk to them. See what they have to say. Don’t argue with them. Just let them express their feelings. Being heard by a close family member is a great healing practice.

Students need to feel that their feelings are valid and real. Just hearing them will already make them more prone to address them. As your child expresses their stress factors, help them see those stresses realistically.

Often, we tend to exaggerate the importance of things, causing more stress and pressure. Give your child an alternative approach to those stress factors. Show how working through them will greatly improve their mood and mental state.

Explain to your child that stress is not the answer. It’s nice to share your emotions and see how your tension slowly fades. Show them that sometimes they are making a monster out of something they can’t control or something that hasn’t (and may never) happened, yet. Teach them to take each thing as it comes and deal with it individually.

Help Them Organize Their Time

Stress often comes as the result of poor organizational skills and lack of time. In fact, time pressure is the number one factor in causing stress, especially for college students.

Students get distracted by college life, not noticing how quickly their deadlines and exams approach. Once caught off guard, they start to panic.

Squeezing in as much homework as you possibly can isn’t helpful. Such tactics will only lead to a lack of sleep, anxiety, despair, and poor academic results. As a parent, you can explain the importance of doing everything in time to
your children.

Start by helping them create an all-year calendar. There, students should have all their classes, big dates (deadlines, exams, etc.), family holidays, and everything else they should know about in advance.

Then, by looking at their calendar, a student will see how to plan their weeks and days to keep up with every task. This makes life much less stressful especially when they are taking things one at a time.

Next, think of a schedule to help them manage the academic workload. Having a healthy routine will help them stay calm and focused. It should also alleviate much of the stress involved.

A good schedule will help them keep track of their activities and stay on top of things. Side note: These are great skills to start them with in high school to make the college transition that much easier.

Teach Coping Techniques

Young people should know at least a few coping techniques to fight stress. For example, meditation and yoga can be great tools when facing difficult times in school.

Both of these activities teach people to breathe and stay concentrated. Thus, a student will breathe through a difficult exam and keep their focus on where it should be in the first place. 

There are other techniques like visualization, affirmations, breathing techniques, positive thinking, etc. All of those coping mechanisms work great, just finding the one that works best for your child is the key.

However, knowing and using at least one or two such techniques is necessary. That way you’ll know your child can deal with stress even when you’re not there to help them. 

Set Goals Together

Often, stress comes as the result of unrealistic goals and expectations. Students tend to put too much pressure on themselves.

They take too many classes to handle and accept too many assignments and other work. These are things that shouldn’t be happening.

Students get too ambitious and set unreachable goals for themselves. They plan to learn a language in a year, earn every scholarship they apply for, join clubs, or socialize too much

Rushing through your goals and setting unrealistic expectations will ultimately lead to more stress. As a parent, you can help them build better goals and achieve their dreams at the right pace and time.

Do you have tips and tricks for helping kids with the stresses of college. Feel free to leave comments below helping other parents through this stressful time.