So, I spent a good part of my early career trying to understand what regulates stress in very young children who were too young to regulate stress by controlling and predicting and all of those things. And the biggest thing was relationships. So what regulated, incredibly powerful stress regulators, to be in a secure attachment relationship with a person who is present. Not just to be in a secure attachment relationship and that person isn\u2019t present, but to have that person present and you trust, and we\u2019re still trying to figure out but I think it actually influences a region call the orbital frontal cortex, and it probably actually short circuits the signals to stress biology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what, for example, we studied babies when they were going to their Well Baby checkup\u2014I use doctors a lot to stress babies because they could do things to make the baby healthy that were way more stressful than I could do\u2014and we were interested in the physical exam and the shots that babies get. Two big shots. One in each thigh. Two months, four months, six months, and sometime in the second year. And we followed babies over those shots, and boy, at two months they\u2019re little bodies were going off like crazy, but that was probably okay because they don\u2019t have all those receptors yet for stress biology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then it began to shut down and by 12 months, they didn\u2019t elevate at all. Now, they cried like heck. They hated having shots. Their heart rates went up. But their cortisol didn\u2019t budge. Unless they were in an insecure attachment relationship with their parent, in which case it activated, not horribly, but it was as if the presence of that secure relationship was serving as a buffer. And the less secure relationships were sort of leaky buffers. We of course know that if you take that buffer away, if you send a child to child care, and they\u2019re alone, they\u2019ve lost their buffer and they haven\u2019t yet made the relationship with the person in the day care centre, it\u2019s going to take weeks of every day that baby\u2019s going to elevate, a lot. But after a time, after about two, three weeks, they only elevate a little bit. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I spent a good part of my early career trying to understand what regulates stress in very young children who were too young to regulate stress by controlling and predicting and all of those things. And the biggest thing was relationships. So what regulated, incredibly powerful stress regulators, to be in a secure attachment […]<\/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-1344","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1344","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=1344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1345,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1344\/revisions\/1345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}