Rethinking Stress for Youth in All-Girls’ Schools

Published On: January 1, 2020

Written By: Joelle Therriault, Tatyana Terzopoulos, Mira Gambhir, Carolyn Mak and Izza Tahir

Rethinking Stress for Youth in All-Girls’ Schools

Overview

Caring about the healthy development of girls¹ and young women is a priority for many school communities. Well-being, along with academics and international mindedness, are the key strategic imperatives that support our mission to inspire a love of learning and make a difference in their lives. As authors, we come from a school community that understands and values well-being for girls and young women, believing it is foundational for their engagement in learning and in life. Drawing from recent research and experiences from the all-girls context, we offer our readers an overview of what stress is and its connections to girls and rigorous learning environments, ending with key takeaways for the community.

Introduction

Those of us who parent or work in schools and other settings with young people are curious about their lived experience of stress and their ways of adaptive coping. We find ourselves wondering how best to support the efforts children and adolescents engage in as they navigate the challenges that life presents. Adults play a pivotal role in the ways girls derive meaning from and respond to life’s stressors.

At times, it can seem as though the prevalence of stress and anxiety is epidemic, particularly for young people. The myriad messages we receive each day in our interactions with each other and through traditional and social media make stress and anxiety difficult topics to avoid. We are often told that we currently live in an “Age of Anxiety” (Shorter, 2013), and indeed, a recent global study (Booth, Sharma & Leader, 2016) found a significant increase in anxiety worldwide between 1970 and 2010, with students in America and Canada, in particular, experiencing higher levels of anxiety. According to the 2017 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS), 30.4 per cent of students reported elevated levels of stress (CAMH, 2017), with female students in Ontario twice as likely (41.5 per cent compared to 20 per cent for male students) to report elevated stress levels (Boak et al., 2018, p. 81). Other studies yield similar results, signalling that the impact on girls persists, both in our society and in independent school settings (Statistics Canada, 2015; Leonard et al., 2015).

As a result, professionals working in all-girls’ schools and our girls’ families, acknowledge that they are faced with a dilemma (Damour, 2019). On one hand, we acknowledge that stress can be useful in developing coping skills and is part of educational experiences; on the other hand, there is a need for a call to action to support young people in cultivating the coping skills needed to thrive in today’s world.

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