Teaching Teenagers to Cope With Social Stress
By JAN HOFFMAN SEPT. 29, 2016 , The New York Times
A. Finally, the students themselves were asked to write positive advice to younger students. Dr. Yeager believes it helps that the teenagers learned coping skills in a lecture-free zone. “The more adults tell kids how to deal with their social life, the less kids want to do it that way,” he said 2New research suggests they can. Though academic and social pressures continue to pile on in high school, teenagers can be taught effective coping skills to deal with stress and depression.
B. New research suggests they can. Though academic and social pressures continue to pile on in high school, teenagers can be taught effective coping skills to deal with stress and depression.
C. These results were measured through the students’ self-reporting in online diaries and through hormone measurements. The studies are small. Some 60 students from the Rochester, N.Y. area participated in the first trial; the second involved 205 ninth graders from a high school in suburban Austin, Tex.
D. David S. Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a leading voice in the growing effort to help college students stay in school, has been turning his attention to younger teenagers to help improve their ability to cope with stress at an earlier age. His latest study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found a surprisingly effective technique.
E. In 2017, researchers will try to reproduce these results on a larger scale, in some 25 high schools across the country. Adults played no significant part in the exercise, researchers said. Students essentially taught themselves this mental trick, and when they were experiencing a lot of social stress, they had a reassuring interpretation ready to frame it. The exercise consisted of three steps.
F. At the beginning of the school year 2016, students participated in a reading and writing exercise that makes students understand a basic, almost banal message which helps in coping with tension: People can change. The results were positive: the students who completed the exercise had lower levels of stress, reported more confidence in coping and achieved slightly higher grades at year’s end, compared to a control group.
G. First, students read a short, engaging article about brain science, describing how personality can change. Then they read anecdotes written by seniors about high school conflicts, reflecting how they were eventually able to shrug things off and move on.
H. Laurence Steinberg, a professor of adolescent psychology at Temple University, also agrees that all schools should practice this exercise in order to teach teenagers how to cope with stress. To sum up, the research has shown, he said, that “if kids believed intelligence was fixed, they would believe nothing could be done. But if you change this belief, their academic performance does dramatically improve” which is a success in itself.
I. ALMOST four million American teenagers have just started their freshman year of high school. Can they learn better ways to deal with all that stress and insecurity?
J. “We’re asking kids to persuade other kids,” he added. “That feels respectful to them, and motivating. It’s a chance to matter. As these freshmen reflect on how they coped in middle school, the exercise forces them to put things in perspective.
