Adolescent Stress

Chap Clark’s chapter on stress and busyness struck me powerfully. You may have heard of something called a Life Stress Test. This test assigns a point value to a long list of major life events. You select the events that have occurred in your life over the last couple of years and are left with a stress score; this score indicates how much stress you’re dealing with in your life. Things like death of a spouse and divorce hold some of the highest point values. In Clark’s book, he discusses a similar test created just for adolescents. Clark lists some of the items on the list, and it looks like this:

• Death of a parent…100 points
• Parents divorce…73 points
• Parents separate…65 points
• Parent travels as part of job…63 points
• Parent remarries…50 points
• Parents reconcile…45 points
• Mother goes to work…45 points
• School difficulties…39 points
• Threat of violence at school…31 points

All of the point values are what I would have expected except for one…mom going to work. Mom going back to work is equally as stressing to adolescents as parents reconciling after being separated. Mom going to work is more stressing than school problems or even being threatened with violence at school. Frankly, I’m surprised that even made it to the list of potential stressors; I’ve just never thought of it that way.

But it’s something to think about. Many moms, including the sincerely godly, Christian moms, go back to work when the kids “get older.” Usually when all the kids are in school (sometimes elementary or middle, but at least by the time they get into high school), moms usually begin to think about heading back into the work field. And this seems perfectly naturally. The kids are growing up. They don’t need (and usually communicate that they don’t want) mom at home to take care of them. I’ve even figured that when my kids were “old enough,” I’d probably go to work or at least do some heavy volunteering somewhere. But apparently this mom-going-back-to-work-thing is more stressful to teenagers than any of us realized. 

Something happens to the pace of life when a mom enters the work field. Life speeds up – exponentially. Every family knows the pressure of balancing the load of household chores, making dinner, helping kids with homework, Bible studies, community groups, sports, extracurricular activities for our kids, and so on. When mom spends half a day or more at work, all those activities get condensed; there’s less time to do everything that needs to be done, not to mention the fact that work robs mom of some of her energy. And that’s when the margin in our lives starts to disappear. Our evenings are filled with activities, some important, some frivolous. And there is no time (or energy) to connect with each other. And families are paying the price.

Let me interrupt myself here to clarify that I’m not condemning women who work outside the home. I understand there are women who have to work, and there are some who simply choose to do so. While I believe that God designed women to manage their households under their husband’s authority, I’ll never pass judgment on a woman who works outside the home. Who am I to judge? For this post, I’m simply trying to assert the fact that with moms at work, the pace of life in the home does speed up, and usually, intimate relationships are harder to achieve because of the fast pace.

Reality Check – Like I said, I got a big reality check on this. I’ve learned that just when I thought it might be perfectly harmless to go back to work, I might need to re-think that. That may be the time when my kids need me at home the most.