School children face a lot of emotional issues during the period of development. It is a stressful developmental period filled with major changes in physical maturity and sexuality, cognitive processes, emotional feelings, and relationships with others. This can bring more frustration and confusion that lead to Stress and a pattern of reactive behaviour in adolescents that affect their academic performance, cause anxiety and also affect their overall emotional and the physical well being. A literature search was conducted with the following search terms, Key- words and phrases – ‘stress’, ‘School children’, ’Adolescents’, ‘prevalence’, ‘effects’ and ‘Strategies’. The search was performed in the following databases – Pubmed, Medline Plus and Google Scholar. Considerable debate exists regarding the causes for the high prevalence of stress among school children. From this review we infer, that there are various factors which influence prevalence of stress among school children and adolescents. Rather than a single causative factor, there are multiple factors associated with the stress such as socio –demographic variables. Research literature supports the necessity for the early identification of stress in school children and initiate suitable interventions. It is of paramount importance that guidelines specific to the Indian context are developed for the screening and monitoring of prevalence and occurrence of stress among school children
