Childhood toxic stress occurs when a child experiences repetitive, sustained, or severe stress without the support of a caregiver. Without a caregiver to comfort and soothe them, children are unable to calm down after stressful situations, staying in a state of heightened alert for a long time, or even permanently. Toxic stress can have a serious and lasting impact on a child’s development, making them more vulnerable to mental and physical health challenges as adults.
Childhood toxic stress usually develops when a young person experiences different kinds of early-life adversity without the stable and comforting support of a caregiver. This can happen in cases of maltreatment or abuse, but also after natural disasters or during wars or economic hardships, where caregivers themselves are stressed and unable to attend to their children’s emotional needs. A child may also experience toxic stress when a parent is facing mental health challenges and there aren’t other caregiver figures to step in.
Children who experience toxic stress are more likely to develop stress-related mental health disorders, including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. They’re also at an increased risk of physical illnesses like diabetes or stroke.
However, while toxic stress can have a profound impact on a child’s life, caregivers can shield a young person from the intensity of a stressful situation and the harm caused by toxic stress. By providing stable, responsive care, soothing a child when they feel anxious or scared, adults can help children to calm down, even in the most difficult situations.
This blog offers some information about our stress response system, toxic stress, and how it affects young people. It also provides some advice for caregivers supporting children in very stressful contexts.
Understanding Our Stress Response
Our stress response is a set of physical and psychological changes that we experience in reaction to stressful situations. These situations can be real or perceived, and physical, emotional, environmental, or hypothetical. Stressful situations (or stressors) can also be subjective: a certain event may trigger a stress response in one person but not in another.
When we encounter a stressor, it triggers our sympathetic nervous system, a part of the autonomic nervous system involved in our stress response. This causes a cascade of changes in our brain functions, hormones, and immune systems. Our heart rate and breathing increase, our digestion slows, blood flow to our brain and muscles increases, we become more focused on perceived threats, and we are more alert.
Usually, after the perceived threat subsides, our parasympathetic nervous system helps our bodies return to a calm, baseline state. However, sometimes our stress response continues for a prolonged time. This might happen when a perceived threat is ongoing (chronic stress) or after experiences of traumatic stress that overwhelm our natural coping mechanisms.
Positive, Tolerable, and Toxic Childhood Stress
While the term stress usually has negative connotations, not all stress experienced by a child is bad. Some level of stress is necessary for the healthy development of stress response systems that build resilience in the future.
Experts have identified three different types of childhood stress: positive, tolerable, and toxic stress.
Positive Stress
Positive stress is a normal stress response that lasts for a short time, isn’t intense, and doesn’t happen too often. It’s facilitated by a caregiver who can support and soothe a child when they feel stressed, helping them to calm down again. For example, a child may feel stressed when they meet a new person or attempt a new task. But with the verbal reassurance or physical affection of a caregiver, they can be supported through the experience and develop motivation and resilience.
Experiences of positive stress are fundamental for a child’s development, helping them learn how to handle stressful experiences in the future.
Tolerable Stress
Tolerable stress is a stress response that is more intense, frequent, or lasts longer. While this type of stressor has the potential to harm a child’s development, a supportive caregiver can soothe a child and help them return to baseline after the stressor has subsided. With strong social support and caregiver relationships that are responsive to their needs, their brain and body can fully recover.
A child might experience tolerable stress after the death of a loved one or a family conflict, while nevertheless receiving stable and loving support from an adult.
Toxic Stress
Toxic stress occurs when a child’s stress response system is activated for a long time, and their body doesn’t fully recover from the experience. This usually happens when a child lacks stable support from a caregiver who is able to offer comfort and support. Without this support, a child experiences a more intense stress response and isn’t able to return to baseline functions.
Toxic stress might happen in situations of neglect, poverty, violence, family conflict, or parental mental health challenges. While toxic stress can result from mistreatment, it can also arise when a caregiver loves and tries their best to care for a child. When a caregiver is themselves overwhelmed by a situation, it can be very hard to provide a child with the comfort they need, especially without additional support.
How Does Toxic Stress Affect a Child’s Development?
Our ability to deal with stress is governed by our stress response system. These circuits of brain chemicals, hormones, and physical and psychological changes are plastic, meaning that the way they work can be influenced by environmental factors. It’s especially malleable in early childhood, when early life experiences shape how easily the stress response system can be activated, and how effectively someone can return to their baseline state.
When children experience toxic stress, it impacts their developing brain networks and hormonal systems, causing overreactive stress response systems that are hard to calm down. As they grow older, they may experience intense fight or flight reactions to situations without any real danger, becoming hypervigilant and sensitive to perceived threats. For example, they may respond impulsively to or feel threatened by a facial expression they read as hostile or angry, when it is actually calm. Or they might remain in a state of high alert for a long time after a perceived threat has passed.
When activated for short periods and infrequently, our stress response systems are an important tool for responding to urgent or dangerous situations. But when they are activated too often and for too long, it can damage our mental and physical well-being. Frequent and prolonged activation of the stress response system is associated with a range of mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety, and physical health conditions like diabetes or stroke.
Overreactive stress response systems are also linked to our immune systems. Cortisol is released as part of our stress response, helping the body to adapt and cope with threatening situations. But it also plays a key role in regulating our immune systems. When our bodies experience sustained, high levels of cortisone, it can suppress our immune functions, impact memory, and lead to the loss of muscle and bone. Prolonged, elevated cortisol levels among children may alter regions of the brain involved in learning and memory.
Research has linked chronic family stress to increased illness among children. Childhood abuse and household dysfunction – two key sources of chronic stress – have been associated with a range of mental and physical health conditions in adulthood, including depression, suicidality, and alcohol abuse.
Protecting Children Against Toxic Stress
Toxic stress can have profound consequences for a child, now and in the future. However, children can also be protected against toxic stress, even in incredibly difficult environments and conditions. The steady, stable support of a caring adult can buffer the impact of stressful situations and calm a child’s stress response system, preventing the harmful, prolonged stress responses that characterise toxic stress.
Research has found that the presence of a responsive, sensitive caregiver can prevent high levels of cortisone among toddlers, even those who are more prone to fear or anxiety. Other research suggests that parental warmth can shield children from the impact of extreme stress, such as growing up in poverty.
In general, strong parental warmth in childhood is associated with fewer health conditions in adulthood.
Alongside parental warmth and responsiveness, the type of care that children receive in childcare or educational settings is also important. Children who spend more time in childcare settings with fewer adults, less supportive relationships, or less caring adult-child interactions tend to show elevated stress hormone levels. On the other hand, childcare settings with enough sensitive and responsive adults to give children sufficient care and attention may help them cope with stressful situations.
Supporting a Child Through Stressful Situations
If a child is in a stressful situation, empathising with how they might be feeling can help adults to understand the best way to offer comfort and support. Thinking about what kind of thoughts and emotions a child is experiencing often prompts a strong, instinctive sense of what to do next, whether that’s physical comfort, soothing words, or a more protective role.
While in an ideal situation, we would be able to remove children from situations of intense, prolonged stress, that’s not always possible. But physical and emotional comfort can go a long way towards shielding them from the impact of this stress, even in incredibly difficult contexts.
Soothing a Child When You’re Also Experiencing Stress
In many situations where a child is feeling stressed, adults are too. It can feel very hard to buffer the effects of toxic stress on a child when you’re also overwhelmed, frightened, or distressed.
In these contexts, it’s important to remember that there are things you can do to protect a child, even when you’re in an incredibly difficult situation. Recognising and accepting that a situation is challenging for both you and your child, and finding the language to describe what you are experiencing, can help you find practical steps to take to provide comfort and warmth.
Reaching out for support from others is crucial. Looking after yourself is important, and the best way to care for your child. Don’t be ashamed to ask for and accept help from others. If you’re struggling with your mental health, seek professional support as soon as you can.
Parenting and family support can also help parents develop skills to support a child in challenging circumstances, such as when a child experiences behavioural difficulties.
Mental Health Support Programs for Young Children and Families Experiencing Toxic Stress
There are many circumstances that can make raising children challenging for parents. Experiencing challenges when parenting is normal and not something to be ashamed of. But if parents are struggling to provide the attention and comfort a child needs to avoid toxic stress, it’s important that they receive support.
Parenting support may take the form of extended family support, community-based efforts, family interventions, and parenting skills training. These interventions should be guided by an understanding of toxic stress and how it can be prevented. As well as offering practical support for childcare, interventions may help families to reorganise and recover after conflicts or family trauma, making the home a less stressful environment and strengthening family relationships.
Skills training sessions and psychoeducation programs can provide parents, teachers, child-care workers, and other caregiver figures with expert training in responding to and supporting children who show signs of toxic stress. This can be particularly important when toxic stress manifests as impulsivity, hyperactivity or oppositional behaviours, which can make parenting more challenging.
If a child is experiencing mental health difficulties related to toxic stress, the earlier they can receive mental health support, the better. Specialised treatment can support children to recover from toxic stress and protect against the long-term developmental harm it may cause.
The Wave Clinic: Specialist Mental Health Support for Young People and Families
The Wave Clinic provides specialist residential and outpatient mental health treatment for young people and families. Our programs take a whole-person approach to mental health support, sensitively addressing experiences of trauma, including family trauma, that shape how young people and family systems feel, act, and relate today.
Our parenting interventions include three, five, fourteen, and twenty-one-day parenting intensives that focus on skill building, awareness, and recovery support, especially when a young person is facing mental health challenges. We also offer family intensives, combining clinical sessions with experiential therapy and transformation through memory creation.
If you’re interested in our programs, reach out to us today.
