Example of How Stress Can Effect Children
Example of how Stress can effect Children
Disturbing, resilience, and courageous are merely a glimpse of how impacting the story of Mary Karr’s life was growing up as a child in an unpredictable home life. Reading about situations that Mary and her sister experienced made me think about my own childhood with its crisis and misfortunes. I myself have never come close to experiencing anything in my life like she had, but how she described the situations she endured made me feel her frustrations and vulnerabilities. Even with the difference in the time era from today Mary’s traumatic and stressful childhood growing up in the 60’s coincides with what we have been learning in this class. There are many examples that can be related to the information about stress and how it affects children in today’s society.
The way she starts her memoir is like she is unfolding memories she had tucked away during the pecks of the stressful and at many times traumatic events she experienced during her early childhood. The way in which she begins makes it seem like she is standing in the room as the events unfold. Mary used the terms, “may have” and “ I suppose” to describe her feelings and some details about the night her mother was pronounced Nervous. She described the way of coping in a very powerful manor. “When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out.” This idea makes Mary’s coping strategy when she was a child similar to denial. She erased many of the details of that night to defend herself from the magnitude of the event. Later, this seems to be a defense mechanism when the older neighborhood boy sexually assaulted her. She seemed to block out the memory until she was mature enough to understand what had happened. However other crisis situations she explains with much more detail as if she did not store them away to make them as if they had never happened. Mary as a child has coping skills to help her deal with her situations but at her young age her management skills were not yet developed enough. She did not seem to use management skills when dealing with her peers and pressures to void violent or hostile arguments. As the story of her life unfolded anticipatory coping was sometimes present in her young age. When again she...