Emotional Stress: Any Difference for Kids vs. Adults?

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Parents of WP, enlighten me on yet another topic. This thread will be similar to the whining one I posted earlier.

I'll illustrate all this with a story. When I was in my pre-teens to early teens, my parents argued constantly, more often than not, with me sitting 20 feet away. (My older had moved out long time ago by then, and even before she moved out, they never argued in front of her, only me.) The arguing was at full volume, with frequent threats to file for divorce. One day, after a particularly intense argument, we all went grocery shopping. I decided to give a shot at using emotional appeal, a skill NT kids know how to use ever since they learn to talk. I picked up a package of snacks, and said:
"Can I get one of this? It'll help me deal with emotional stress."
"We have emotional stress too; you don't see us complaining," they answered.

A perfectly planned thought-terminating cliche! After all, adults have emotional stress too. Needless to say, they did not buy me those snacks, and they were pretty healthy too; it was dried squid. I learned that life is unfair back when I was still in diapers. But adults have so many more ways to cope when life's unfairness rears its ugly head. Let's look at some lists; pardon the gender stereotypes.

Coping methods adults (aspie and NT) have, some healthy, some not so much, but all legal:
* Buy oneself a small treat
* Confide to an understanding friend or relative
* Take a walk in the park alone
* Have a heart-to-heart talk with a friend (more common for women)
* Watch a sports game with their friends to take the mind off (more common for men)
* Pig out on chicken wings (men) or ice cream (women)
* Smoke a cigarette or two
* Drink a few shots of vodka, or chug a 40 of beer
* Get a prescription drug from a doctor to calm oneself down.
* Do an extreme sport
* Spend all night on the internet
* Look at pornography
* Go out dancing in a club
* Try out those adults-only, non-sexual cuddle parties, that are supposed to give you an emotional high from the oxytocin released
* My personal favorite: take a cruise solo, where the ship is my oyster, and I don't have to compromise with anyone

Coping methods NT kids have, legally:
* Complain to a friend who can't do much beyond listening
* Use social manipulation to convince their parents to give in
* Play a competitive sport to get the aggression out
* Pick on an aspie kid at school (sad, but true)
* Gossip about Justin Bieber and Hannah Montana

Coping methods aspie kids have:
* [sound effect: crickets and tumbleweed]

Now, with these lists in place, it becomes apparent that there's a BIG difference in emotional stress for adults vs. for NT kids vs. for aspie kids, despite all of them experiencing emotional stress just the same. I learned to sympathize with adults experiencing emotional stress, having become an adult myself, but I now have so many more coping methods. So I'm pretty convinced that my parents were comparing apples and oranges. Was I right, in a sense of that I had it worse than adults? Or were my parents right, and I never should have complained about emotional stress? Please share your thoughts, to confirm or disprove my beliefs.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 15 Dec 2013, 2:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think the advantage in coping that adults have over kids comes in two main forms: experience and choice.

Any difficult situation is hardest the first time. For example, a child getting a poor grade in school, may experience it as a massive failure, and a horrible disappointment. An adult getting a poor review at work, may feel similarly, but having handled situations like that before, may be more prepared to deal with it. In this way experience with specific setbacks makes new and similar setbacks less stressful.

Similarly, experience using coping skills can make new situations less stressful. For example, I often take a deep breath when frustrated or upset. It's automatic for me now. When I was a child / teen, I could do that, but sometimes it would take a bit longer for me to notice that I was upset and should be trying to calm down.

Teens also experience elevated hormone levels that represent a brand new and very powerful emotional influence. Adults occasionally can experience similar moments, but they have experience from having lived through being a teenager, and may be better at coping with those difficulties.

Choice is also important. The autonomy that adults have lets them choose to work at a job that fits their personality, and live in a place that makes them feel better, and surround themselves with people who they like, while avoiding people they don't like. Each of these choices improves their quality of life, and makes it possible for them to enjoy life more fully, while experiencing less stress. On the other hand, they also have more responsibilities, which can cause stress, but choice can be a very powerful way to improve well-being.

Children's choices are limited, because adults have to protect them from making poor choices. Sometimes adults can be careless and they limit children's choices needlessly. Other times, it may be important to just let children get used to being disappointed, and not always getting exactly what they want. This is an important experience that helps prepare them for the stressors of adulthood (as noted above). In either case, children have limited freedom, and while their lower level of responsibility may reduce their stress, the lack of choices can be difficult, and can lead to more small stressors.

Your comment on choice is interesting. A business ethics class I took in college talked about the stress equation, or more poetically, the parable of the waitress and the CEO. It's about work, but the same concept applies. The equation is "Stress = Responsibility / Control" (Responsibility is the numerator, and Control is the denominator). A waitress has tons of responsibility and very little control over her job, making it very stressful. A CEO has plenty of responsibility but virtually limitless control, making his job very enjoyable.

Emotional stress for adults vs. kids is no different. Parents have a lot of things to worry about, but they also have countless ways of making themselves feel better: unrestricted access to junk food, alcohol, cigarettes, shopping, watching football, talking to friends, prescription drugs, pornography, extreme sports, internet, partner dancing, and going on cruises alone. Kids have only their favorite stuffed animal at best, which they usually know is just an inanimate object. So, for adults, it's many responsibilities with a lot of control. For kids, it's fewer responsibilities with almost zero control. If you calculate the stress equation, the kids are like the waitress, and the adults are like the CEO. Neither is better or worse than the other; this is strictly math.

Kids are also at a disadvantage when it comes to things like a bad grade in school. When an adult gets a bad review at work, they have the benefit of coming home to a spouse who greets them with a hug and a child who shows them a drawing they made. Or to an empty apartment filled with cold beer and comforting junk food, and a good friend to shoot the breeze with who's just a phone call away. A child who get an F in school risks coming home to a scolding and a loss of TV privileges. This adds insult to the injury of having a much smaller bank of stress coping mechanisms to draw from. Come to think of it, this is exactly why teens experiment with tobacco and alcohol. It's about increasing the denominator of the equation to reduce the net stress amount.

It is about power. Choice is a characteristic of power. Power differentials can create stress or alleviate it depending where are on the continuum one is. If one is stressed but has a high amount of power, one has choice of how to handle it, and in addition small failures are of minor consequence, and less stressful to begin with. One can wield power against others, if one is so inclined, and mentally buttress oneself that way too, I don't have the citations handy, but there have been studies on primates showing the effect of stress on Betas in the group, physiologically and otherwise.

Some adults who feel weak will take it out on those still weaker (often children) just as child bullies target the weakest.

As a separate issue, many of the things that you list people doing to alleviate stress are not done consciously and if a person is not especially self-aware may not even be analyzed after the fact. For example many people stress eat but do it automatically as opposed to consciously saying to themselves I am really stressed out I want a piece of cheesecake.

So it would be very odd to hear a child saying out loud that he wants to buy a snack to make him feel better. It might have come off as being clumsily manipulative. I am not saying that your parents exposing you to the stress in the first place or their subsequent handling of your statement was appropriate. It is not how I would have handled it, certainly, and from your other posts your parents appear to have been very dismissive in general. The statement shows a lot of awareness that I would be impressed my son had, at the very least, but self-awareness is not necessarily in abundance here in Casa ASDMommyASDKid.

That said, if my son asked me for a snack b/c he was stressed I would consider it unusually self-aware and either ask him about it then, or more than likely have a conversation about it later b/c the supermarket is not the best place for that.

Adults have more freedoms but they also have more external pressures and responsibilities than children.

Children may feel more trapped and subject to the whim of the adults around them, but they also (generally) don't have the burden of holding down a job, paying bills/rent, feeding/clothing/caring for kids/pets/property.

So, both have stress, but both have it in different ways.

Adults have more seeming power over their choices how to deal with stress (given their disposable income) but they may also be juggling too many responsibilities and might have financial problems which would negate any perceived advantages/choices a child might think they actually have.

When I was a kid, I used to find very odd ways of coping. Many of them self destructive. But masturbating helped, when I was allowed to close my door.

Masturbating didn't help me cope with stress. In fact, it only made me feel worse, because it reminded me how no girl ever liked me, didn't like me now, or ever could like me. But I digress.

My way of coping with stress in high school was less healthy; it was alcohol. (Only unlike NT teens, who drink to raise their happiness, I drank to lower my unhappiness.) On days when I had detention or extracurricular activities, I'd walk home instead of riding the school bus. On the way, I'd go into a grocery store, and buy a bottle of cooking wine (found in the same aisle as dry pasta and tomato sauce). I never got carded for it, because it clearly said on the label "not for direct consumption" (haha ). So I'd buy a bottle of it, and to keep the cashier from getting suspicious, I'd also get a package of pasta, tomato sauce, canned mushrooms, tuna, etc. After checking out, I'd offload the pasta or whatever into the food pantry drop-box, put the cooking wine in my backpack, and then hide it in my room. On days when my parents yelled at me or when I got bullied particularly severely, I'd wait until my parents go to bed, then take out the cooking wine, and chug it out of the bottle. It tasted like crap, but it was still alcohol, almost as strong as normal wine.

I knew I'd build up tolerance over time, so I didn't do this very often, to keep the alcohol's effectiveness high. Still, if I could travel back in time and meet my high school self, I'd shake that guy's hand! For someone who was very naive and socially weak, this trick with the cooking wine was pure genius! I got the alcohol to help me cope, and paid forward some karma in food donations. (Well, maybe not, since my donations weren't sincere ). Of course, even though I can get the real stuff now, once in a blue moon, I buy cooking wine as homage to my stress coping mechanism from the days of yore.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 16 Dec 2013, 10:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think it's harder for children to cope with stress. They not only have less control over their environments, but they are at the same time trying to learn how to cope. If they're lucky, there will be positive role models to demonstrate these things. Sure, adult life can be stressful but there's freedom, possibility and experience/perspective that makes it no contest.

What?

It's nothing bad. It's exactly what the name implies. A group of people, guided by an objective facilitator, meets in a community center space, and all cuddles together. The facilitator often sits in a chair, rather than cuddling with the group. Kissing is not allowed, and hands may not rest below someone's waist or on women's chests, so it's all strictly non-sexual. If the group is mostly men, they may opt to huddle instead, like football players. I went to an event like that early last week; it was about 50/50 genderwise. We did this odd exercise called "the platform", where about 10 people had to all fit on a 3 ft x 3 ft raised wooden platform, by any means necessary: intertwining limbs, holding hands, putting your arms around each other, etc. I had a blast. I was feeling a quite floaty afterwards, and felt super chilled-out the rest of that day and next day. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuddle_party.

If anyone thinks this is New Age or way out in the left field, here's a more mainstream example. When I was on a Carnival cruise, at one point, I ended up dancing with three women to "Sweet Caroline", the song that practically begs you to put your arms around the people next to you and rock side-to-side, at least during the chorus. At the end of the song, they gave me an affectionate group hug. I felt the same blissful, floaty feeling from it, perhaps even stronger, although the ship's movement might have contributed to the feeling.

As you might have guessed, I'm a sensory seeker. Obviously, putting my arms around strange women wasn't an option back when I was young enough to have to beg my parents for dried squid. My parents were never big on physical affection; I got it mostly as a reward for good grades, and I've never seen them give each other as much as a hug. Plus, I wouldn't have enjoyed cuddle parties or cruises back then, either; those are hyper-social experiences, and I was extremely shy. Hence, the smaller bank of stress coping mechanisms I had.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 16 Dec 2013, 11:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh, I didn't think it was bad at all. In fact, I was thinking it was a lot worse than what you described. Something totally different. I just hadn't heard of it and wanted to know what it was and wondered why I hadn't heard of it.

Cuddle parties sound like HELL. Give me a good (civil) debate or academic discussion any day.

Coping Mechanisms Available to Aspie Kids:

Indulgence in special interests (although, yes, your parents still control access to materials).

Escapism through reading, TV, music, writing, or fantasy (my personal favorite, but I had mostly nice parents who bought me books and paper and/or took me to the library-- hell, I could've been the first kid in my hometown to have the Internet if I'd asked for it).

It's true that adults have more expectations and pressures. And nobody cuts us a break saying, "You're young." But, on the whole, I agree with you-- kids have it worse. Kids have to depend on adults for everything. It's hard to get anyone to take you seriously when you're a kid. Adults are wrapped up in their own problems-- a lot of the time, even if they care, kids' problems seem trivial to grownups. And maybe they are-- but NOT TO THE KID IN QUESTION.

Grownups might have perspective...

...but most of them don't have much of a theory of a kid's mind. Which is a shame, because every adult used to be a kid. What's even worse?? I used to BE an adult with a pretty good theory of my kids' minds-- or at least the ability to remember when I was in those shoes and sympathize/empathize. OTHER ADULTS got mad at me for that, and I was accused of spoiling my kids and making them self-absorbed and disrespectful and generally being a sh***y parent until I believed it and decided to stop caring about their point of view. And now, I'm having a hard time convincing myself to think any other way.

Being an adult sucks-- it gives me to remember a phrase I found carved into a table at a university library: "The farther I go, the less I know." I'm more lost now than I was as a teenager, or in my twenties, or for that matter in my early thirties.

But I wouldn't be a kid again for anything. I had a pretty good childhood-- stellar, for an Aspie kid-- but I would not do it again for anything.

To each his own. I know that as a teen, I would have hated cuddle parties, since I was really shy, not to mention I'd be barred from attending because I was a minor. Now, I get a kick out of them, apparently. That and putting my arms around strange women on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Although that instance would have to be sensory-seeking behavior, especially considering that we were rocking with the ship's movement, rather than with tune of the song.

As you pointed out, my problems seemed trivial to everyone around me, including, or maybe especially, to my parents. It was pretty much me alone against the world. Why else would have I have turned to drinking horrible-tasting cooking wine just to cope with stress? I'm still amazed how I thought of adding a box of dry pasta and such, only to donate it to the food pantry right after checking out, solely to throw off the cashier, so he/she doesn't suspect that an underage person is buying cooking wine specifically to chug it out of the bottle alone in his room.

Unlike you, I had a sh*tty childhood. I'm glad it's gone and never coming back. I love having access to all the adults' coping mechanisms, healthy or not. To this day, the phrase "happy childhood" sounds like an oxymoron to me.