Frustration tolerance training for children

Abstract

When fatigued, lacking sleep, and suffering a mild "cold," most adults will find that they are more easily distracted, and more susceptible to overreacting to frustrating conditions. Their tolerance for frustration can drop further when they run behind schedule. From time to time, practically everybody will have multiple frustrations that relate to a physical vulnerability and undesired condition(s), and will magnify the situation. These transitory, frustration-related, everyday events, come and go. Among stable and mature adults, they are short-lived and rarely interfere with long-term goals, plans, and the quality of life. Imagine for a moment the experience of a child who frustrates more often, easily, and intensely than his or her peers. Children who frustrate easily and often, are likely to blame, rationalize, make excuses, and maintain poor selfconcepts compared to their more highly frustration tolerant peers. For such children, normal impediments tend to evoke an unpleasant visceral reaction and negative thinking. Such reaction patterns can serve as a barrier to many socially desired performances and achievements. Achievement gaps are normally visible to the child who looks at peers who can better tolerate and cope with frustration. What can be done? Admonishing an easily frustrated child, can exacerbate an already negative situation. Preaching rarely promotes a positive outcome. Expedient statements, such as "Stop getting yourself so upset," normally promote more friction than the words relieve. If the child could automatically stop overreacting, the child would likely do so. Positive changes in boosting frustration tolerance are partially developmental, and partially achieved through learning to interpret frustrating circumstances in ways that would give the child a sense of inner control. Since frustrations are so much a part of daily life, a prime challenge is to provide frustration tolerance training so that children can progressively acquire effective frustration mastery skills, and build upon these competencies throughout childhood, adolescence, and their adult lives. Guided frustration mastery efforts can lead to high frustration tolerance, which is the ability to accept the sensations of frustration, the conditions that evoke it, and, whenever possible, to actively and responsibly address the frustration-related problem( s). Helping children develop higher levels of frustration tolerance can aid in the prevention of the projected 50 % increase in childhood mental disability predicted by the World Health Organization (Murray and Lopez, 1996). The technology to do this is here, and getting better. What we need is a largescale positive prevention program. Perhaps the most critical element in this program is to boost childrens tolerance for frustration through promoting evidence-based psychological education programs to increase reasoning and psychological problem-solving competencies. I will later describe an evidencebased rational-emotive psychological education program designed for this purpose. In this chapter I will discuss frustration, low frustration tolerance, and frustration disturbances before describing techniques for helping children progressively master frustration and progressively increase personal, social, and academic performances. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.