For children under the age of eight years parent problems cause most pain. After this children react to troubles at school, problems mixing, learning difficulties and worries about the world. As parents, we can't protect our children from everything, but if we get our own emotional baggage in control we've won half the battle. Unfortunately, there are some hassles that we can't always avoid.
Break-ups
When I was seven I believed in happy-ever-after stories, but now I realise that Cinderella was a fairy tale. Many of today's children live in a war zone: there are no guns or bombs, because the hostilities are taking place within the home.
About one-third of today's relationships will have broken up by the time our children leave school. It's not the break-up that damages the child but the stress before, and the antics that can continue after, the event. These break-ups are going to happen no matter what I do. All I ask is that parents think of the children and handle the inevitable as amicably as is possible.
There is a story of two families who 'lose' a father. In one, a child loses a father to a bitter break-up, following which the parents are full of hate and hurt for years. In the other Dad is killed in a car accident. Psychiatrists looking at this scenario see that a child suffers much more emotional damage from the painful split than they do from the accident. As parents, we can cause much greater harm to our children through our deliberate actions than life's unavoidable accidents can cause. For more information on break-ups and sole parenting.
Employment, moves and money
These days employment is less certain, and for many families redundancy is a reality. A change of fortune caused by unemployment can alter the equilibrium in a family, affect everybody's esteem and stress children.
To improve opportunities many couples choose to cut the family ties and move away to a better area of employment. But, like animals, human beings can be destabilized by new surroundings. To make matters worse, in the new environment parents may be feeling emotionally vulnerable, support might be limited and children will feel uneasy.
Even without unemployment or moving, money problems are a major cause of stress for all the family, including children.
Learning and social difficulties
If life were fair all children would be created with equal learning and social abilities. But life is not fair, and not all children do well in or out of the classroom.
Children who aren't doing so well are often acutely aware of the fact. You can tell a child with reading difficulties that they don't have a problem, but they know otherwise. If this child were just slow, they might not feel so bad, but clever children who struggle feel pain and paranoia. No matter how positive we are, children with major learning weaknesses get stressed and may behave badly.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) disadvantages about two per cent of our school-age population and upsets many good parents. These children under function for intellect and are out of step behaviorally. Their behavior can be many times more difficult than any parent or teacher deserves.
Some of the stroppiest young children I see have language problems. When children can't express or understand what is going on in their lives they can show immense frustration. Some stoics try twice as hard, others withdraw, some to the edge of autism, and some get angry and kick heads. It's not our fault, but it's often we who end up with the headache.
It is cool to be an out-of-step extrovert at school, but it's uncool to be shy, socially uncomfortable, obsessive, odd or clumsy. Shy children feel stressed, kids that appear odd are teased or treated like outcasts and clumsy children are excluded from games.
Some children with these difficulties keep going without complaint, while others act out their frustrations with bad behavior. Stressed children clown in the classroom and take their upset home to dump on those they love. Such behavior is not the fault of the parent but it still lands on them.
