Quality early learning programs can improve the health and lifetime success of children exposed to extreme stress in their early years.

In childhood, fleeting stress can be positive, helping children build resilience and problem-solving abilities. Other stress is tolerable if supportive adults help buffer the effects.  In the early years, different parts of the brain develop the circuitry for vision and such executive functioning skills as working memory, problem solving, and planning. Problems in those areas are easier to correct if caught early because of the brain’s plasticity. That’s when positive reinforcement, such as the sound of an adult reading aloud or babbling back and forth, can encourage the brain to strengthen its circuitry. But plasticity can have a flip side, when stresses derail healthy development, and the lack of positive reinforcement causes the brain to prune away the unused connections – even those that would have facilitated such positive activities as reading and problem-solving.

An intriguing study from University of Wisconsin, asking children to spot the point in photo arrays where happy expressions changed to fearful and sad, showed that children who had experienced early life adversity were likelier to sense the signs of looming anger. The “constant activation of alarms” is a hallmark of toxic stress, causing more wear and tear on the heart and reducing neural connections when the brain should be building new ones.

As adults, children exposed to toxic stress are prone to such adverse health outcomes as greater likelihood of heart attacks and out-of-control eating. But the effects can be minimized if children are exposed to nurturing, stable, and engaging environments.

In the scale of life, positive experiences can outweigh the negative, tipping the child’s scale toward good outcomes. But some children are more sensitive to stress than others. Moving the fulcrum on the scale affects its disposition toward the positive or negative, and the accumulation of positive experiences and coping skills can shift the fulcrum to help children achieve positive outcomes.

Capabilities that help to promote brain development and resilience include focusing attention, planning ahead, behavior regulation, controlling impulses, adjusting to new circumstances, and problem-solving so that children learn to recognize difficulties and brainstorm ways of dealing with them.

These are all particularly good things to focus on because they’re positive.  The child will use circuits to do these things again and again and again, and those circuits will be strengthened, but they’ll also shift the fulcrum. If children learn these skills, they will be much more sensitive to positive things in their life and much more able to deal with negative stresses.

Stable, caring adult relationships, such as those found in quality early learning programs, make a world of difference in the developing child’s ability to cope with stress. They help children build mastery of executive functioning skills and self-regulation. A community that offers structure such as this can help children no matter what is going on in their personal lives.

SOURCE:  Dr. Judy Cameron, Professor of Psychiatry, Director of Science Outreach, University of Pittsburgh, as shared at the PA Early Learning Investment Commission (ELIC) Summit of April 15, 2015, in Harrisburg, PA. For more information and the full recording of Dr. Cameron’s presentation see the PA ELIC website:  http://pa-elic.org/events/economic-summit/2015-summit/