With one holiday behind us and several more ahead, this might be a good time to talk about stress. This particular year may be an extremely stressful holiday for you and your family with the economy on the skids for more than a year. How do you handle stress in your life and in your relationship? But more particularly, how does the way you handle stress impact the stress level of your children?

When marriage and parenting researcher John Gottman, Ph.D. was studying marriage relationships, he originally assessed parents' stressors by giving them a written test to gauge the level of stress in the family. He learned, however, that measuring the stress hormone levels in the children was a more effective way to quickly get to the truth.

When my oldest son was around five years old, we lived in a place where we often needed to take a ferry. Catching ferries with a couple of little kids in tow was a very stressful time for me, but I didn’t realize how that stress was affecting my son until one day he stated, "Mom, I know how to catch a ferry on time!" "How is that?" I asked. "You just breathe like this!" (whereupon he demonstrated rapidly breathing in and out). I was horrified to realize that my behavior was having such a direct impact on his young psyche. I began to work at slowing down, breathing deeply, leaving home earlier to avoid the stress, and realizing that missing the ferry wasn't the end of the world.

That same son now has a five-year-old of his own and this grandson recently gave me a new story. Sitting at my dining room table, he asked me several times if I was a witch. I was shocked, until I realized that with a slight speech impediment he was really asking me if I was RICH. We had a back and forth conversation at that point and it seemed to me that he was quite concerned about money and what it means to be rich. Since I know his parents are struggling in these economic times, I told them of his comment and we had a good conversation about being open about what was going on, but at the same time, recognizing just how much a 5 year old can take in and process.

Often, in times of stress, a child will act out in some way and parents might miss the fact that this is related to stressors in the family. The child can easily become the "identified patient," when there is actually something deeper going on. In my last post, I talked about how some of the feelings we might have as adults can have roots back in our early childhood. As adults, it is important that we are open to learning about our own stress behaviors so that we don't unnecessarily burden our children. I will discuss emotion coaching in a further post. (Emotion coaching is a way to help children process the emotions that they are having.) But the purpose of this post is to help you, the parent, think about how your own stress impacts your children and begin to find ways to deal with that stress.

One of the most effective ways of lowering your stress level is to practice deep breathing. Here are some steps:

1. Take a deep breath and say something comforting to yourself when you exhale: "It's okay" or "Relax" are good options.


2. Watch your breathing. Allow it to slow down and try to breathe from your diaphragm using your full lung capacity.


3. Enhance your relaxation with a memory or image of a peaceful, serene situation - watching stars from a hilltop, lying on a warm beach, or whatever else works for you.


4. Enhance your relaxation by systematically tensing (for five seconds) and relaxing (for 15 seconds) specific small groups of muscles, one group at a time.


5. Enhance your relaxation by using environmental cues - a favorite chair or wrap, listening to a soothing piece of music, or whatever else might be available to you where you are.

Of course, there are a lot of factors involved in lowering the stress levels in your home. Most often if things are chaotic, it is the adults in the family who have the ability to make changes. In the ferry instance I cited above, one solution would be to work at leaving home earlier and not always being in a rush. Or how about discussing financial issues that are stressful after the children are in bed, keeping the discussion at an age-appropriate level when they're around? If your mornings are stressful, find ways to plan ahead the night before in order to change how your family members start the day. The most important thing to remember is that children do feel our stress, even when we think we are good at hiding it!

Terry McNichols is a Marriage and Family Therapist who also blogs at Grace and Gravity and Are We There Yet?