Secure attachment relationships protect kids from toxic stress

© 2022 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

Parents can help children recover from stress by offering physical affection and words of back up. Just is there more? Maybe secure zipper relationships also help kids develop the power to cocky-soothe.

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What happens when you soothe your infant's tears? When you make eye contact, engage your infant in loving "conversations," and show through your consistent deportment, that you lot'll be supportive when your baby is worried or distressed?

We've known for a long fourth dimension that such babies have a better chance in life. When parents respond to their children with sensitivity and warmth, kids are more likely to develop opens in a new windowsecure attachments – loving, trusting relationships that promote confidence and emotional health.

In addition, studies prove that opens in a new windowsensitive, appreciating, responsive parenting protects children from toxic stress, the sort of stress that causes disease, changes the operation of DNA, and alters brain growth.

How exactly does information technology work? If you lot hug your child, or offer comforting words, is it like pressing a button? A magic push that relieves hurting, bolsters backbone, and defuses stress?

The characterization isn't far off the marker.

Parental soothing doesn't just quiet a infant downwardly. Information technology also lowers a infant's stress hormone levels (White-Traut et al 2009).

Infants appear to feel less pain when they experience skin-to-skin contact with a caregiver (Johnston et al 2017).

Babies born with disadvantages — prenatal take chances factors for developing stress-related problems — have salubrious outcomes when their parents provide them with lots of physical amore (Sharp et al 2012; Sharp et al 2014).

And inquiry suggests that older kids benefit too. For instance, a brief, supportive phone conversation with a loving parent can lower the cortisol levels of an anxious child (Selzer et al 2010).

But what'due south especially intriguing is the power of remembered dearest.

Experiments on adults show that just thinking about a loved one can diminish concrete pain (Einsenberger et al 2011). And studies betoken that certain reminders can help the states cope with stress. They might fifty-fifty disarm parts of the brain that make us experience anxious or threatened.

To run across what I mean, consider a encephalon browse study conducted by Luke Norman and his colleagues (2015). The researchers asked 42 college students to view a series of photographs, merely the images varied depending on grouping assignment:

• Students in the attachment security priming condition viewed photos of people showing affection and support for each other — photos that primed the brain to think about secure attachment relationships.

• Students in the control status viewed only images of household objects.

Next, each student was hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, and asked to sentinel another series of pictures.

Some of these depicted emotionally neutral content, similar geometric shapes. Simply in other cases, the content was designed to put people on border. Students were shown faces with fearful or angry expressions.

The researchers already knew that such faces activate the amygdala, a office of the brain that specializes in threat detection, and switches us into stress-mode. The question now concerned the priming.

Would prior exposure to those "experience good" social images make whatsoever difference to the brain's threat detector?

The respond was yes. Compared to students in the command group, those who had been primed to recall of secure zipper relationships showed less activation in the amygdala.  And this was specially true for individuals with anxiety bug (Norman et al 2015).

Of course, this is but a unmarried study. Merely the results are consistent with a growing body of show: Attachment security priming has a number of beneficial effects (Gillath and Karantzas 2019). It reduces physiological stress. It enhances working memory functioning (Bai et al 2019; Gokce and Harma 2018). Information technology may even heave creative problem-solving (Mikulincer et al 2011).

Exercise children experience similar benefits? At that place'southward reason to recall so.

Brandi Stupica and her colleagues tested the effects of secure attachment priming on ninety young school children (ages 6 and 7).

In this study, the social back up images were presented very briefly — so briefly, in fact, that the kids weren't fifty-fifty conscious of having seen them.

Then, subsequently existence presented with these subliminal images, kids looked at a series of pictures designed to make them experience frightened or nervous.

The researchers monitored children'due south stress physiology, and, compared the results with those of children in a control grouping. Did the subliminal, "feel good" images make a difference? Yes. The kids who'd been primed showed less evidence of fright and stress, and the children's home life mattered too: The least-stressed kids were the ones who had secure attachment relationships with their parents (Stupica et al 2017)

Then perhaps this explains – at least in part – the health advantages enjoyed by kids who grow up with secure zipper relationships. It isn't only the immediate support that matters – those times when a parent offers concrete affection and emotional reassurance. Peradventure, too, it's the powerful memories that these experiences create – memories that aid kids soothe themselves.

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More reading

Assuming they don't have to cope with poverty, family trauma, or corruption, how practice children go stressed-out in the first place? I've written a number of manufactures almost it.

Fascinating — and agonizing — research suggests that opens in a new windowbabies are affected when they overhear their parents fighting. They can also opens in a new windowsense our stress. Young children sometimes experience stress in daycare, and (as I explain in my commodity nigh the importance of good educatee-teacher relationships) older children can get stressed-out in school.

For tips on coping with stress, see these Parenting Science articles:

• "Stress in babies: How to keep babies calm, happy, and emotionally healthy,"
• "Emotion coaching: Helping kids cope with negative feelings,"
• opens in a new window"Positive parenting tips: Getting improve results with humor, empathy, and diplomacy," and
• opens in a new windowParenting stress: 10-evidence based tips for making life better

And for more information near the effects of parental warmth and secure attachment relationships, encounter these articles:

• "The science of zipper parenting,"
• "The health effects of sensitive, responsive parenting," and
• opens in a new window"The authoritative parenting fashion: An evidence-based guide."

Finally, are you wondering how researchers determine if a child is "securely attached?" Run into this opens in a new windowParenting Science guide.

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References: How secure attachment relationships protect kids from toxic stress

Bai X, Chen X, Zhou 1000, Liu C, Hu Y. 2019. The effects of negative context and attachment security priming on working memory updating amongst anxiously attached individuals. Biol Psychol. 143:41-52.

Eisenberger NI, Master SL, Inagaki TK, Taylor SE, Shirinyan D, Lieberman MD, Naliboff BD. 2011. Zipper figures activate a safety signal-related neural region and reduce pain feel. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 108(28):11721-half-dozen.

Gillath O and Karantzas G2. 2019. Attachment security priming: a systematic review. Curr Opin Psychol. 2022 February;25:86-95.

Gokce A and Harma Thou. Attachment anxiety benefits from security priming: Evidence from working retentivity performance. PLoS One. 2022 Mar ix;13(3):e0193645.

Johnston C, Campbell-Yeo One thousand, Disher T, Benoit B, Fernandes A, Streiner D, Inglis D, Zee R. 2017. Skin-to-peel care for procedural pain in neonates. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2:CD008435.

Liddell BJ and Courtney BS. 2018. Zipper buffers the physiological impact of social exclusion PLoS One. 13(nine): e0203287.

Mikulincer M, Shaver PR, Rom Eastward. 2011. The effects of implicit and explicit security priming on artistic problem solving. Cogn Emot. 2022 Apr;25(iii):519-31.

Norman L, Lawrence N, Iles A, Benattayallah A, Karl A. 2015. Attachment-security priming attenuates amygdala activation to social and linguistic threat. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2022 Jun;ten(6):832-ix.

Selzter LJ, Ziegler TE, and Pollack SD. 2010. Social vocalizations can release oxytocin in humans. Proc Biol Sci. 277(1694):2661-six.

Stupica B, Brett BE, Woodhouse SS, Cassidy J. 2017. opens in a new windowAttachment Security Priming Decreases Children'southward Physiological Response to Threat. Child Dev. 90(iv): 1254-1271.

Content last modified 6/2019

Portions of this article, "How secure attachments protect kids from toxic stress," are derived from "How love protects your infant's brain," a weblog mail by the aforementioned author published past Baby Centre in 2014.

Image of mother kissing baby past DieselDemon / flickr

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Source: https://parentingscience.com/secure-attachment-relationships/

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