One of the things that, as I did discover in my research which I had not anticipated, and I\u2019ve spent quite a while following up, is that if I watch children at child care, they elevate these stress levels over the day. That\u2019s 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\u2019ve never found a child care quality place where we don\u2019t see elevations over the day, especially for the younger kids. It\u2019s an age-related phenomenon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So our babies don\u2019t do it as much as our toddlers. Our toddlers, up to about age two, they\u2019re showing the largest increases, and then by about five you don\u2019t. Now that\u2019s 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\u2019re creating contexts that are developmentally inappropriate. They\u2019re trying, they\u2019re doing tons of circle time with two-year-olds. They\u2019re doing \u201clearn your ABC\u2019s\u201d. They\u2019re intrusive and over-controlling and they\u2019re creating a context that\u2019s just very over-challenging for younger children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And hostility on the part of the caregiver, that\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To try to find out if it mattered, the kids we\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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\u2019t have to statistically worry about trying to control for multiple kids in the same settings etcetera. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019t elevating, you decreased your anxiety at child care over time. You became less fearful and anxious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve had a debate for a long time over what\u2019s the impact of child care? And what should we do for fearful and anxious kids? Nathan Fox has said, \u201cOh great. Send them into child care. It reduces their fear and anxiety\u201d. But other people have found that, \u201cGee, those are the kids, who if they\u2019re not in good quality care, actually show increasing problems\u201d. Well, this study is right. They\u2019re in the mix. So if you\u2019re fearful and anxious, a little inhibitive kid, and you\u2019re in child care where you\u2019re not elevating, you\u2019re learning to be less fearful over time. If you\u2019re in a child care where you\u2019re elevating, you\u2019re retaining all that information about every single instance where things were scary and it\u2019s becoming more fearful and anxious for you. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things that, as I did discover in my research which I had not anticipated, and I\u2019ve spent quite a while following up, is that if I watch children at child care, they elevate these stress levels over the day. That\u2019s a very unusual pattern; normally we start high and go down as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1071","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1072,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1071\/revisions\/1072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}