Simplicity Parenting Read Online Free

complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
    The psychological community is also beginning to recognize that the attributes and behaviors I was seeing—hypervigilance, nervousness, anxiousness, a lack of resiliency, a lack of impulse control, a lack of empathy, and a lack of perspective taking—all worsen when a child accumulates enough little pieces of stress, with enough frequency. Such a consistent pattern of stress can accumulate into a PTSD-type scenario, or CSR.
    CSR describes a reaction to a pattern of constant small stresses, a sort of consistent threshold of stress that may build, but rarely dissipates. Please understand that I am not referring here to the level of stress that is a fact of life. I am not suggesting that stress should not exist for children; it does, and it must. Children experience frustrated desires, illnesses, sorrows, and losses. Their lives are not stress free, and childhood is not a series of “rainbow moments,” each lovelier than the next. Indeed, imagine the six-year-old who, his dream life full of superheroes and superpowers, discovers in a fall from the backyard cherry tree that he can’t fly. His broken left arm is very painful, scary to see, and there is also the frantic trip to the hospital emergency room. Such childhood accidents can be awfully stressful at the time. Yet the next day, and with each retelling as a family story, the episode becomes a classic tale of bravery, of fears calmed by concern, of strength and heroism. (Not the flying variety of heroism—alas—but the kind Ralph Waldo Emerson described: “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.”)
    The level of stress described by the term CSR, in its frequency, is very different from the stresses that occur quite regularly and normally in a child’s everyday life. In day-to-day life a child’s moods and well-beingare like a seesaw; stress acts like a weight on one end, but once the stress is gone the overall balance returns. The “gift” of a scraped knee, an argument with a friend, five days flat out with the flu—these can strengthen a child’s resilience and their awareness of their own abilities. Such normal stresses are examples of “necessary resistance.” We all, including children, need to meet resistance in life in order to learn how to understand it, work through it, and move on. Such stresses may be worrying, but not damaging if we learn we have the skills and the support to deal with them, and move beyond them. Stress that is damaging is either too large, or too constant to move beyond. If our abilities (or a child’s abilities) can’t match it, then he or she can’t understand it, or work through it, and they become stuck in a reoccurring cycle of stress reactions.
    CSR is characterized not by the severity of a traumatic event, but rather by the consistency or frequency of small stresses. What was the cumulative effect of these stresses on the children’s psyches, and behavior? What I came to understand was that little stresses, collectively, drag on a child’s ability to be resilient: mentally, emotionally, and physically. They interfere with concentration, with an emotional baseline of calm, with a sense of security that allows for novelty and change. They interfere with focus, not just for the item or task at hand. These stresses distract from the focus or “task” of childhood: an emerging, developing sense of self.
    What has also become increasingly clear to me is that so much of this stress is what we now call daily life. It is the life that surrounds our children, a daily life that is unfortunately not that distinct from those we lead as adults. A daily life submerged in the same media-rich, multitasking, complex, information-overloaded, time-pressured waters as our own.

    This is a fairly depressing notion, really, to think of childhood being under attack. It is also difficult to unravel, or pin down. I don’t believe the attack is a result of