Shanker – developmental expressions of stress

So the question that you’ve just asked me is whether there are what we might call “developmentally identifiable landmarks,” whatever, to differentiate between say how a toddler might express stress behaviour versus a teenager. It’s a difficult question and I’ll tell you why. The first part of the question is yes. So typically what happens-let’s take a toddler-is we’ll see very pronounced changes in facial complexion and they might go very pale or very, very red and will have very pronounced changes in vocal behaviour, so their voice will generally speaking go up. They become very volatile, very labile is the technical term. They become very volatile and their emotions swing all over the place. 

So those are typical toddler into preschool expressions of this. One of the things that children are getting much better at is concealing these sort of raw emotions. So they’re learning how to suppress their emotional expressions and so on. And by the time they are young teens, they can even look you in the eye. They’ve gotten so good at inhibiting their anxiety, concealing their anxiety that they can look at you in the eye and even maintain a straight face. However, if it becomes strong enough, if the arousal is strong enough that older child or that teen will in fact regress to the level of a toddler. The behaviours will in fact regress as well. This is very difficult for parents for example who have an older child or a tween that is truly behaving like a young toddler but because of their age we insist on treating them as a young adult or whatever. But in fact in functional terms, in terms of what’s happening in their brain, they are at a toddler’s level. I would go so far as to say that older adults, could regress to the level of a toddler.