Helping your child handle stress and
build resiliency during COVID-19 

by Erin Johnson, MA, LPC

During these adverse and uniquely challenging times, it is more important than ever to protect children’s emotional well-being and help them manage stress. Children’s development continues on, even as pandemics and crisis overhaul life as we know it. Supporting that development and building resiliency doesn’t have to take an extraordinary amount of time or effort. There are simple ways to support your child’s well-being while facing the adversity and stress from COVID-19. Focusing on three important principles- supportive relationships, life skills, and reducing sources of stress- can assist your child in successfully adjusting to changes and having
better outcomes after experiencing a trauma or crisis.

Supportive relationships

Extreme experiences that cause excessive stress can be harmful to children’s developing brains and can overload their capacity to engage productively in school, families, and communities. Powerful stress-protection shields exist in the form of supportive caregivers, families, and
friends. Studies have shown social connectedness improves children’s chances of showing resilience to adversity. Stable and responsive relationships help protect children from the potential harm that excessive stress can cause. Here are some tips:

1. Minimize abrupt and significant changes to important relationships in the child’s life.
2. Strengthen family relationships by promoting frequent interactions and meaningful connections through play-time and structured activities.
3. Keep relationships thriving through video-chats, letters, phone calls, and other forms of communication with those you and your child can’t physically be with.

Life skills

Children and adults alike, depend on a set of essential skills to support our ability to focus, make plans, adapt to changing situations, and resist impulsive behaviors. These skills are developed over time through practice and teaching. Parents can encourage their children to make healthy choices through modeling appropriate social behavior, creating and maintaining supportive, reliable relationships and establishing routines. Parents can help their children’s development of beneficial skills and problem-solving capabilities by:

1. Looking for opportunities to teach new skills to children in everyday life at home.
2. Creating regular opportunities to learn and practice new skills in age-appropriate settings.
3. Breaking down new problems to solve in manageable steps. Provide supportive feedback along the way.

Reduce sources of stress

Not all stress is bad. However, reducing the pile-up of potential sources of stress will protect children from experiencing a stress response overload to multiple biological systems. Excessive stress can lead to feeling out of control, which can then lead to adverse reactions and behaviors in children. Having fewer experiences that trigger a powerful stress response allows for children’s developing brains to strengthen neural connections and learn valuable cognitive skills used for problem-solving and self-regulation. Parents can help their children reduce and manage stress by making sure their basic needs are met, establish consistent and predictable routines at home, focus on responsive caregiving through daily interactions, play-time, and open
communication.