Mary Minner makes it her business to know what worries children. As the school counselor at Rosemary Hills Primary School in Silver Spring, Missouri, Ms. Minner, a soft-spoken woman with owl glasses and long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, tends to the emotional needs of more than 500 students in kindergarten through second grade. If she has learned one thing, it is that young people are not immune to stress.

So Ms. Minner developed an eight-week "stress management and confidence-building" seminar for second graders. Once a week for 45 minutes, a half-dozen 7- and 8-year-olds referred by their teachers or parents gather around her conference table. Surrounded by books and colorful puppets, they practice relaxation techniques and learn the power of positive thinking.

The goal? To help them "find that quiet on the inside," Ms. Minner said.

In a world where inner quiet is all too rare, much has been written about children and stress, particularly since the September 11th terrorist attacks. Even before that, the self-help shelves of bookstores brimmed with volumes devoted to helping youngsters overcome trauma, be it divorce, serious illness or the death of a loved one.

"Far less attention has been paid to helping young people cope with day-to-day stresses like taking tests, competing in sports, being invited to the right birthday parties and staving off playground bullies. At the same time,’ said Dr. Georgia Witkin, director of the Stress Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, "childhood is more stressful than ever, but not for the reasons most people think. "

"The assumption has been that we are overloading kids with activities and demands and that was the major stress," said Dr. Witkin, who surveyed nearly 1,000 children from 5 to 11 for her book KidStress. "Children feel stress not because they are overbooked, but because their parents are."

"The most important thing I found is that kids don’t see us `de-stress, " Dr. Witkin said. "Every other generation saw parents going through hardship. But they also saw family meals or playing in the street. Now grown-ups de-stress in the middle of the night, after everyone else goes to sleep."

There is no way to measure the extent of childhood stress. Health officials do not gather statistics for the problem, as they do for diabetes or cancer. But there are certain indicators. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in 1997 a startling 21 percent of high school students had contemplated suicide in the previous year and that eight percent had tried to kill themselves.