Under Pressure

Under Pressure uncovers the hidden anxieties and stresses that school-aged girls experience and what parents, educators, and all of us can do to help them break through it and succeed.

We’ve seen many social, political, and legal advancements for women in the last few years. It might be easy to look at this and think they have it easy, but the truth is life as a girl can be difficult.

The amount of anxiety and stress girls are experiencing is rising dramatically. Some of these burdens are negative, but it’s vital that we recognize that others are positive.

Getting out of your comfort zone, for example, has been shown to result in personal growth. This is a form of useful stress because it builds resilience and strength to tackle future trials. Anything that’s unfamiliar, like speaking in public, can produce this kind of growth.

Anxiety is also beneficial at times. Being afraid of something can indicate that something is wrong. If you haven’t studied for a test enough, for example, you’ll probably worry about it.

But there are limits to how much anxiety can be helpful.

Say your daughter breaks her arm. If she has friends in her class that can take notes for her, this could improve her resilience.

Consider, instead, if your daughter has a broken arm and her chances of getting into college depend on her athletic performance so she can get a scholarship. The anxiety from this situation can be damaging because there’s no foreseeable way out.

You can find out if the fear your daughter is experiencing is negative by examining her mental, emotional, or financial capacity to get through it. If she can’t change her situation, then it’s going to be too much.

Dr. Damour is an educational psychologist that sees a lot of girls in the middle of a meltdown. One such girl named Jamie came in tears once, afraid of failing a chemistry test she had to take. Although Jamie wanted to avoid the test, Dr. Damour knew that wouldn’t help her anxieties. She did begin by empathizing with Jamie’s worries, but didn’t let her try to get out of it. That’s because anxiety only gets worse when we avoid things that scare us. Consider the outcome if this young woman had gotten out of the test. She might have felt relief at first, but eventually, the anxiety would come back even worse when she had to take other tests. Trying to escape your problems also keeps you from learning the important truth that failure isn’t always a bad thing. Rather than letting Jamie evade what she was afraid of, Dr. Damour taught her to approach it with baby steps. She had…