Everyone experiences stress in their daily lives. Some of it, like deadlines or first-date nerves, is good stress. It propels you forward and helps you accomplish goals. Some stress, like the car in front of you slamming on the brakes, is acute, but temporary. But a more concerning type of stress that’s gained a lot of attention in the past few years is toxic stress, long-term, unrelenting exposure to stressful situations. In young children, this stress can alter the development of the brain, creating shortcuts to the parts of the brain that “turn on” stress responses and limiting connections to the parts of the brain responsible for learning and reasoning.
What Stress Does to Us
Because of the life-altering potential of managing and mitigating stress, especially in early childhood, it’s important to understand when, why, and how children experience it. Stress isn’t just emotional. The feeling of stress is caused by physical changes in the body, which can be measured by examining levels of different enzymes and hormones, including alpha-amylase and cortisol. Alpha-amylase typically increases over the course of the day until the late afternoon, in line with our sleep schedules.
Higher cortisol indicates higher psychological distress. While we expect cortisol levels to decrease over the course of a day, there’s some evidence that children in full-time childcare actually show increased levels by the afternoon. To explore why this might be the case, researchers looked to process quality (children’s immediate experiences and interactions in childcare settings) to find out.
First, they selected a random sample of 14 participating childcare centers in North Carolina. The sample was drawn to represent varying levels of quality (as measured by their quality rating and improvement system) and childcare subsidy (as a proxy for income). Data collectors conducted CLASS observations over the course of two days. In order to measure stress, they also collected saliva samples from 63 children across those classrooms at six intervals: both days shortly after arrival, after morning free play, and in the late afternoon.
In general, children’s cortisol levels across the day looked like a wide “v,” with similar levels observed at morning arrival and in the afternoon and a dip in the mid-morning. Late afternoons looked to be the most stressful (slightly higher than at arrival), which was consistent with prior research about increasing stress across the childcare day.
How Interactions Can Help Children Feel Less Stressed
However, Emotional Support changed this pattern. Instead of the end-of-day increase in cortisol levels, children in classrooms with higher Emotional Support showed an overall decrease. This pattern is similar to those of children who remain at home. Additionally, their alpha-amylase levels were lower (showed less baseline stress) than their peers in less supportive classrooms.
Although this is a small study in a limited location, the results make sense. The warm, sensitive relationships and child focus found in classrooms with high Emotional Support sound a lot like the environment we hope children have at home! The results also provide additional support for the importance—academic, social, and in this case, physical—of fostering effective interactions.
Citation: Hatfield, B.E., Hestenes, L. L., Kintner-Duffy, V. L., & O’Brien, M. (2013). Classroom Emotional Support predicts differences in preschool children’s cortisol and alpha-amylase levels. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28. 347-356.