Gunnar – stressful events

So in thinking about the kinds of stressors that children can encounter, we’ve talked about sort of the positive kinds of stressors. Right, where the child is actually in their repertoire to maybe figure out how to deal with it. There’s a supportive caregiver around. They’re developing competence while they’re doing it. And we’ve talked about toxic stressors where there is no supportive caregiver, or the caregiver’s gone over to the other side, the child isn’t able, and they’re producing chronic activation of stress biology which is wearing the system down.  

There’s an intermediary, or a different type that we talk about that is tolerable. Stress. And that’s, boy, big activation of stress biology, typically because of things that are way outside of the range of what a child can deal with on their own. Natural disasters. A terrible car accident. Death of a parent. We can go down the list. Famine. War. But we know that in those contexts, still, the most important predictor of whether the child will do well is, is there someone who is serving as that protective, supportive other that can step in as the biggest mediator of this. If there is, then the child will probably be able to do reasonably well. Maybe even learn something from those situations.  

But if the, unfortunately, what makes those things shift over to toxic stress, is they frequently break the caregiving system also. And that’s why as a society, we try to step in when we’re doing it right to re-establish a caregiving system in those contexts. But we’re not always very successful. 

It needs to be someone who can be consistent, responsive, I mean we do what we can right. I mean if the caregiving system is completely broken we try to identify somebody for at least a period and then try to get them into permanency. It’s that shift to permanency we often struggle, struggle with. And in many contexts, there’s just not the infrastructure to be able to do that. So there are a lot of kids worldwide who are growing up learning to act first, think later.