Stress & Learning Struggles: Helping Your Child Build Resilience

Learning difficulties are a major source of stress for children. While it might seem like they’re just not trying, are lazy, or are falling behind due to school conditions, there are real neurobiological reasons why kids who struggle in school feel inadequate and unprepared for their daily tasks. Helping your child build resilience is essential to breaking the vicious cycle of feeling stressed and overwhelmed, falling behind, and believing they can’t succeed.

The Brain’s Response to Stress

When the brain detects stress, it triggers one of three responses: fight, flight, or freeze. Biologically, our bodies are programmed to respond to threats in ways that best ensure survival. However, in today’s world, stress is constant. The signals of “danger” are nearly nonstop, and we are feeling the effects.

When the body senses danger, whether real or perceived, it starts a hormone cascade that affects the entire body, including the brain. While you may notice physical reactions like sweating, an increased heart rate, or freezing, internally, even more is happening.

In particular, the brain faces a battle as soon as stress is perceived. The release of cortisol (the stress hormone) produces chemicals that can damage or kill brain cells and inhibit the hippocampus from creating new neurons. Cortisol also affects the amygdala (the brain’s emotional regulation center), impairing your ability to reason through problems. Instead, you may react irrationally and experience increased fear, anxiety, depression, and anger due to chronic stress.

Stress and Learning

Chronic stress makes it biologically impossible to learn. Problem-solving becomes infeasible, reasoning through questions or tests is out of reach, and emotional reactions overshadow logical actions. The brain also struggles to form new memories.

Does this sound familiar with your struggling learner? Many kids in school show signs of anger, aggression, avoidance of schoolwork, and what seems to be a lack of focus or memory. However, it goes deeper than that. Learning difficulties act as a constant stressor on the brain, depleting resilience.

How Learning Difficulties Resemble Stress and Trauma

Children (and adults) with learning difficulties live in a state of chronic stress. Imagine being continually pushed to do something you’re not good at. How would you feel?

Now, imagine doing that all day, every day, being tested on it, compared to peers or siblings, and being told (or telling yourself) that you’re “behind, slow, stupid, or out of it”… when you’re just trying to keep up.

It’s no wonder that many kids with learning difficulties have low resilience and low self-esteem, which damages their confidence and holds them back from achieving their full potential.

It’s a vicious cycle. Learning difficulties act as a constant stressor in the brain, preventing rational thinking and memory formation, further increasing their difficulties with learning. And so it continues—unless they are addressed by building cognitive capacity.

Building Resilience to Overcome Stressful Learning Environments

As a parent of a struggling learner, your goal is to build resilience in your child. Resilience is their ability to handle stressful situations and return to normal functioning. Simply saying “calm down” or “try again” isn’t enough to build your child’s resilience. You need to proactively develop these skills within your family. Some strategies include:

• Spend daily one-on-one time with your kids doing something they love. This communicates security and safety to their brain, providing a safe place to return to in stressful situations.
• Help your child manage their emotions through your steady, constant support and presence. This investment will pay off even when they are away from you because it models healthy stress management strategies they can take with them through life.
• Identify activities your child enjoys and excels at, and engage in them daily. Focusing on these areas of confidence can go a long way towards building resilience in the not-so-easy areas.
• Cognitive skill strengthening. The brain is wired in a certain way, but that doesn’t mean learning difficulties are permanent. Building cognitive skills can help your child improve their capacity for learning, focusing, reading, and remembering by strengthening the neurological connections that govern these processes.

Brain Training for Learning Struggles

Brain training is a valuable tool for many families seeking to enhance their struggling learners’ abilities to handle stressful school environments. The pressures of time, distractions, and overwhelm won’t disappear. Instead of accommodating these issues, it’s crucial to support and build the skills needed to thrive in any learning environment. Brain training helps achieve this!

Many clients report less aversion to schoolwork, greater confidence, and reduced oppositional behavior as significant improvements resulting from brain training.* 

While results vary, we’d love to partner with your family to build your child’s capacity for learning and make school less stressful and overwhelming. Call us today to get started!

*Results based on surveys of past clients. You or your child may or may not achieve the same outcomes.