Coping With Adolescent Stress Essay Samples

The recognition of the dynamic interaction between a person and the environment forms the basis of the interest in stress and coping. Stress situations form part of everyday emotional life in the adolescent stage. Stress occurs when an individual lacks the capacity to handle a given circumstance that causes tense and unpleasant feelings. Stress threatens the mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing of individuals. It triggers health-compromising behaviors and leads to depression, poor eating habits, insufficient sleep, and alcohol and drug abuse. The development of a healthy coping mechanism prevents the initiation of health-compromising behaviors and reverses the harmful effects of the behaviors.
Adolescents undergo a series of normative physical changes and increased expectation to act maturely. Increased behavioral autonomy characterizes the adolescent stage. Adolescents devote more time in judging themselves and evaluating the ways others see them. They also seek opportunities and spaces to act independently and make decisions from a personal perspective. Parental control depicts the most critical stressor in the adolescent stage as it undermines individual behavioral autonomy. Stressors refer to the source of stress linked to an environmental stimulus that threatens the individual and leads to a coping response. Parental control leads to stressful situations because of general conflicts with parents as the adolescents seek autonomy. Adolescents feel rushed, undermined, and disregarded when the parents deny them a chance to make decisions autonomously. Hopelessness acts as a mediating factor between emotional vulnerability and increased depressive symptoms in stressful situations. Hopelessness and depression affect personal goals and lead to the involvement of adolescents in risky behaviors in which drug abuse is the most common. The important factor remains to find a way to cope with the stress.
Coping refers to an integral part in which individuals respond to the stressors to minimize the adverse effects in relation to the risky behaviors. Two types of coping strategies exist, including problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. The emotion-focused coping refers to strategies that focus on reducing discomfort associated with stress. Problem-focused coping involves the active confrontation of the problem to solve it. Adolescents need to focus on addressing the problem rather than avoiding the problem.
The emotion-focused problem uses avoidance techniques to reduce discomfort associated with the problem of conflict with parents at the adolescent stage. The emotion-focused approach fails not address the problem thus ineffective in addressing the conflicts which remain unavoidable as the behavioral changes progress. The approach relies on avoidance techniques which provide room for risk-taking behaviors such as alcohol abuse with the aim of confronting the painful reality of adolescent changes. The problem-focused approach orients towards changing the stressful situation through steps to solve the problem. In the problem-focused approach, adolescents seek information from counselors to evaluate the responses anticipated to the parent-adolescent conflict. The approach aims to alter and consequently improve the well-being of the adolescent through positive social support factors. Visiting a counselor helps the adolescent to share the problem and to receive valuable information related to responses and events linked to conflict with their parents. The valuable information helps them to make sense out of the situation and bring their parents on board to discuss the conflicting factors. With the social support and professional help, the adolescent evaluates personal responses to the stressors and makes informed decisions based on consensus rather than individualism.