5 Tips to Stress-Guard Your FamilyPart 1: Recognize
importance of family stress management
Joe and Emily live in Southern California with their three young children. Both work and must commute 2 hours daily on busy freeways, often not getting home until 7:30 PM, exhausted and depleted.
Stressed, they have little patience for antics of their young children. This results in frequent shouting matches, defiance on part of children, and escalating family tension.
As above illustrates, stress is often an underlying cause of anger in family members. Sometimes stress is caused by events outside of family which family members bring into home. In other cases, behavior of family members creates stress and tension in home. In either case, it becomes a problem when parents find themselves constantly yelling at their children or disagreeing with each other on parenting strategies.
In meantime their children continue to do what they please—or continue bickering and fighting with each other. When not addressed, stress becomes a major factor in marital unhappiness and, ultimately, divorce.
Stress and family members Joe and Emily both suffered individual stress symptoms. These included fatigue, irritability, angry outbursts, headaches and a discontent with their lives. They began feeling increasingly distant from each other.
Their children were also stressed-out; tired, irritable, cranky, and demanding of attention. They often fought with each other and deliberately did things to get each other in trouble with their parents.
Symptoms of family stress
Just as individuals can become overloaded and stressed-out, so can families. To understand how this can happen, we must remember that families such as Joe and Emily’s are basic building block of our society (like most societies).
Part 2: How empathy reduces family anger
Families consist of two or more people with shared goals and values and with a long term commitment to each other. Families are supposed to help children learn how to become responsible, successful, happy, and well-adjusted adults. When this no longer happens due to stress, family unit becomes dysfunctional —as family no longer serves its purpose fully, easily or consistently.
