According to children, these high levels of stress are having an impact on the family. The findings suggested that parents underestimate both how much stress their children are experiencing as well as the impact their own stress has on their children. Children as young as eight years old reported that they experience physical and emotional health consequences often associated with stress.

Parents underestimate the impact their stress has on the family as a whole, which could have far deeper healthy implications than they realize. More than two thirds (69 percent) of parents of teens and tweens say that their stress has slight or no impact on their children, yet only 14 percent of children report that their parent’s stress does not bother them. In addition, one-third of children (34 percent) say they know their parent is worried or stressed out when they yell.

Children who say their parent is always stressed are more likely to report having a great deal of stress themselves than those who say their parents are never stressed (17 percent vs. 2 percent). Nearly half of tweens (47 percent) and one-third of teens (33 percent) say they feel sad; one-third of tweens (36 percent) and 43 percent of teens say they feel worried; and one-quarter (25 percent) of tweens and 38 percent of teens say they feel frustrated when their parents are stressed. More than half of parents say that it takes some or a great amount of effort to get their families to eat healthy foods (56 percent) and to get their families to be physically active (54 percent). At the same time, tweens and teens report that they turn to sedentary behaviors to make themselves feel better when they are really worried or stressed, such as listening to music (36 percent of tweens and 66 percent of teens), playing video games (56 percent of tweens and 41 percent of teens) or watching TV (34 percent of tweens and 30 percent of teens).

“Even though children know when their parents are stressed and admit that it directly affects them, parents are grossly underestimating the impact that their stress is having on their children,” says psychologist Katherine C. Nordal, Ph.D., APA’s exectutive director for professional practice. “It’s critical that parents communicate with their children about how to identify stress triggers and manage stress in healthy ways while they’re young and still developing behavioral patterns. If children don’t learn these lessons early on, it could significantly impact their physical health and emotional well-being down the road, expecially as they become adults.”

Read the full report and download graphics at http://www.stressinamerica.org.

To learn more about stress and mind/body health, visit the Pennsylvania Psychological Association’s Web site, www.papsy.org, or the American Psychological Association’s Consumer Help Center at www.APAhelpcenter.org.