Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Stressed Kids More Likely to Become Obese

Nine-year-old children who were chronically exposed to such stressors as poverty, crowded housing and family turmoil gain more weight and were significantly heavier by age 13 than they would have been otherwise, a new study has found. The researchers suggest the reason is that ongoing stress makes it tougher for children to control their behavior and emotions -- or self-regulate. That, in turn, can lead to obesity by their teen years.

The researchers measured the height and weight of 244 9-year-olds in rural New York state and calculated their various physical and psycho-social stressors -- for example, exposure to violence, living in a substandard house or having no access to such resources as books. They also measured the children's ability to delay gratification by offering them a choice between waiting for a large plate of candy versus having a medium plate immediately. The researchers measured the children's height and weight again four years later.

While the study doesn't prove that a child's inability to delay gratification causes her to gain weight, there's strong evidence to suggest that it does, according to Gary Evans, an environmental psychologist at Cornell University, and a co-author of the study . First, previous studies have shown that chronic stress is linked to weight gain in children and teenagers, and that children eat more sugary, fatty foods when stressed. Second, there's a plausible neurocognitive mechanism that may help better understand this behavior, Evans said. "There's some evidence that parts of the brain that are vulnerable and sensitive to stress, particularly early in life, are some of the same parts involved in this self-regulatory behavior."

The study appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Source: MedicalXpress
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-stressed-kids-obese.html

Young Girls May Lose Sleep Over Pressure to Be Thin

Some people may lose sleep over the pressure to be thin -- especially young white girls who are being pushed by female friends to lose weight or stay skinny, according to a new study.

"There is a significant amount of research in other areas regarding pressure on adolescent females to minimize body weight, but this pressure as it relates to sleep health is a less-explored topic and its consequences are mostly unknown," said the study's principal investigator, Katherine Marczyk, a doctoral student in clinical health psychology and behavioral medicine at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. "These results are important as this discovery could be one of the first steps in this research," she explained in a news release from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

In conducting the study, which was to be presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Minneapolis, researchers asked 789 Texas middle-school students, all females and averaging 12 years of age, to describe how much pressure they felt to lose weight and be thin.

The girls also pinpointed the sources of this pressure, which included peers, family, friends and the media. Researchers then assessed the girls' quality of sleep to measure how this external pressure to be skinny affected how much sleep they got.

The pressure the girls felt to be thin from girlfriends as well as from the media significantly predicted sleep duration, accounting for 4.5 percent of the difference in how much sleep the girls got.

That discrepancy in sleep duration jumped to 6 percent among white girls (about 60 percent of the study's participants) who faced pressure to be skinny from their friends, the investigators found.

Source: U.S. News & World Report
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/sleep/articles/2011/06/14/young-girls-may-lose-sleep-over-pressure-to-be-thin

Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen

The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

Campus counselors say the survey results are the latest evidence of what they see every day in their offices — students who are depressed, under stress and using psychiatric medication, prescribed even before they came to college.

The economy has only added to the stress, not just because of financial pressures on their parents but also because the students are worried about their own college debt and job prospects when they graduate.

For many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/education/27colleges.html?_r=1

Students More Stressed Now Than During Great Depression

A new study has found that five times as many high school and college students are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues as youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era.

The findings, culled from responses to a popular psychological questionnaire used as far back as 1938, confirm what counselors on campuses nationwide have long suspected as more students struggle with the stresses of school and life in general.

"It's another piece of the puzzle — that yes, this does seem to be a problem, that there are more young people who report anxiety and depression," says Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and the study's lead author. "The next question is: What do we do about it?"

Though the study, released Monday, does not provide a definitive correlation, Twenge and mental health professionals speculate that a popular culture increasingly focused on the external — from wealth to looks and status — has contributed to the uptick in mental health issues.

Pulling together the data for the study was no small task. Led by Twenge, researchers at five universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 high school or college students who, from 1938 through 2007, took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review.

Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938. A few individual categories increased at an even greater rate — with six times as many scoring high in two areas:

• "hypomania," a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism (from 5% of students in 1938 to 31% in 2007)

• and depression (from 1% to 6%).

Twenge said the most current numbers may even be low given all the students taking antidepressants and other psychotropic medications, which help alleviate symptoms the survey asks about.

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-01-12-students-depression-anxiety_N.htm

How Stressed Are Kids? More Than We Think

Worrying about school and about their family's finances are causing the most stress for kids, according to the American Psychological Association, which for the first time included young people ages 8 to 17 in its annual Stress in America survey, released Tuesday.

The survey of 1,206 young people and 1,568 adults, conducted over the summer by Harris Interactive, found that parents underestimated the level of stress children feel and the causes of that stress, often thinking that family relationships or activities cause more stress than children say they actually do.

Among findings:

•44% of young people say doing well in school was a source of stress.

•30% worry about their family having enough money.

•10% felt pressure over their extracurricular activities.

•8% say relationships with their parents were a source of stress.

In the survey, 63% of parents said they believed their stress levels had slight or no influence on their child's stress levels.

But psychologists say that doesn't reflect reality.

"If you ask the typical adult whether children are worried about the economy, you'd say, 'Of course not. They only have to worry about school,' " says pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg, an associate professor at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

He says young people "absolutely worry about the things they see us worry about."

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-11-04-APAkidstress04_ST_N.htm