Gunnar – impact of child care

One of the things that, as I did discover in my research which I had not anticipated, and I’ve spent quite a while following up, is that if I watch children at child care, they elevate these stress levels over the day. That’s a very unusual pattern; normally we start high and go down as our normal diurnal rhythm. But they go up over the day. They go up especially in poor quality child cares, but they go up in any quality child care. I’ve never found a child care quality place where we don’t see elevations over the day, especially for the younger kids. It’s an age-related phenomenon. 

So our babies don’t do it as much as our toddlers. Our toddlers, up to about age two, they’re showing the largest increases, and then by about five you don’t. Now that’s nervous making. Does it matter? It is affected by the quality of the care giving. We know that the more intrusive, over-controlling caregivers are the ones who drive this up more, They’re creating contexts that are developmentally inappropriate. They’re trying, they’re doing tons of circle time with two-year-olds. They’re doing “learn your ABC’s”. They’re intrusive and over-controlling and they’re creating a context that’s just very over-challenging for younger children.  

And hostility on the part of the caregiver, that’s no surprise, will drive these hormones up. They also drive the behaviour, and, I mean, this is no surprise, the behaviour and the hormones are telling us pretty similar stories. 

To try to find out if it mattered, the kids we’ve always been more concerned about, are the ones who are more anxious and fearful. Because, I explained to you, what parts of the brain should this be affecting? The regions that are regulating anxiety and fearfulness. It should be tipping you towards being more anxious and fearful, if you are anxious and fearful, you activate stress biology, it becomes like a little snowball going down the hill. So, we’ve in research where we were studying children in family day care, we did that not because we thought family day care was more stressful, if anything, it probably should be less, but we wanted to have one child in each child care so that we didn’t have to statistically worry about trying to control for multiple kids in the same settings etcetera.  

So we were studying children in family day care, we observed them, we collected their saliva, we tested them in the laboratory to know how fearful and anxious they were, we followed them up six months later to see how their behaviour had changed. And what we found was, if you elevated cortisol across the day and you were not very fearful and anxious, it didn’t make any difference. The stuff went up. Yeah, fine, went up. If you were high anxious, and you elevated over the day, you became more anxious over time. If you were high anxious, behaviourally inhibited, and you were in a context where you weren’t elevating, you decreased your anxiety at child care over time. You became less fearful and anxious. 

We’ve had a debate for a long time over what’s the impact of child care? And what should we do for fearful and anxious kids? Nathan Fox has said, “Oh great. Send them into child care. It reduces their fear and anxiety”. But other people have found that, “Gee, those are the kids, who if they’re not in good quality care, actually show increasing problems”. Well, this study is right. They’re in the mix. So if you’re fearful and anxious, a little inhibitive kid, and you’re in child care where you’re not elevating, you’re learning to be less fearful over time. If you’re in a child care where you’re elevating, you’re retaining all that information about every single instance where things were scary and it’s becoming more fearful and anxious for you.