Estresse infantil, escolaridade e contexto familiar: um estudo com alunos do ensino fundamental

Abstract

The literature has demonstrated that stress, one of the most common problems that modern man faces today, has achieved great importance in Brazil and worldwide, especially regarding their symptoms in childhood. Stress can cause damage to human development to lead to difficulties or disadvantages for the physical and emotional child. Still, variables present in the school and family can act as precipitating stress or child support as promoter of healthy development. The research objective was to investigate the children's stress on elementary students, and to evaluate, in a subset of these, family and school possible aspects that could be acting as risk factors and / or protection. Participated in the first stage of the study included 103 students from the 2nd and 3rd years of primary education in a public school federal from Minas Gerais - Brazil (mean age 7 and 8 years), their parents and teachers. For the screening of students with significant indications of stress was applied collectively to Escala de Stress Infantil - ESI. The correction standardized scale showed 63 children with expressive indices of stress (61.2%). Of this total, 28 children (44.5%) were identified as being in the last two stages of stress - near-exhaustion and exhaustion. Was delimited, from these data, a subset of the 20 participants who showed the highest levels of stress. At this stage of the research were interviewed parents and teachers with scripts that addressed three themes involving sixteen questions in the case of interviews with parents and fourteen questions in the case of teachers. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and subjected to content analysis. The results showed that both parents and teachers believe in the occurrence of stress symptoms in childhood associated with behavioral and physiological reactions. From the perspective of parents, besides the difficulty of implementing preventive strategies to stress, family factors, as conflicted relationship within the family, irregularity of routine infant, children's difficulty in dealing with rules and boundaries, were identified as significant stressors for children. Regarding the speech of teachers, behavioral changes and the occurrence of somatic symptoms were associated with the family and those factors intrinsic to the child and his routine. Also indicates that most children manifest behaviors of concern that require individual attention, including challenging behavior, and a conflicted relationship with their teachers. It is noteworthy, therefore, the need for implementation of new studies that may provide insight to the generation of actions that promote social and emotional development of these children from the delimitation of potential generating sources of stress in these contexts.