Children who are especially reactive to stress are more vulnerable
to adversity and have more behavior and health problems than their
peers. But a new longitudinal study suggests that highly reactive
children are also more likely to do well when they're raised in
supportive environments.
The study, by scientists at the
University of British Columbia, the University of California, San
Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, appears in the
January/February 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.
"Parents
and teachers may find that sensitive children, like orchids, are more
challenging to raise and care for, but they can bloom into individuals
of exceptional ability and strength when reared in a supportive,
nurturing, and encouraging environment," according to Jelena Obradović,
an assistant professor in the School of Education at Stanford
University (Dr. Obradović was at the University of British Columbia
when she led the study).
The researchers looked at 338
kindergarteners, as well as their teachers and families, to determine
how family adversity and biological reactivity contribute to healthy
development.
They found that children who had significantly
stronger biological reactions to a series of mildly stressful tasks
designed to look like challenges in their daily lives were more
affected by their family contexts, both bad and good. This means that
highly reactive children were more likely to have developmental
problems when growing up in adverse, stressful family settings.
But
contrary to expectation, such children were also more likely to thrive
when they were raised in caring, low-stress families because of their
sensitivities to the supportive and nurturing qualities of such
environments.
"The study tells us that when children are
highly susceptible to stress, it's not always bad news, but rather
should be considered in terms of the type of environment they live in,"
explains Obradović.
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The study was funded, in part, by the National Institute of Mental Health.
