How Chronic Stress Short-circuits Parenting

In the best of circumstances, raising a toddler is a daunting undertaking. But parents under long-term stress often find it particularly challenging to tap into the patience, responsiveness, and energy required for effective child rearing. Now research from a University of Rochester team helps to explain why chronic stress and parenting are such a toxic mix. The study finds that ongoing strains, like poverty or depression, disrupt the body's natural stress response, making mothers more likely to engage in a host of problematic parenting behaviors, including neglect, hostility, and insensitivity.

"Stress gets under your skin," explains Melissa Sturge-Apple, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and lead author on the Development and Psychopathology paper to be published in October. "It literally changes the way a mother's body responds to the normal demands of small children and those changes make it much harder to parent positively."

Although the effects of stress have been well documented in children and linked to a variety of diseases in adults, this is one of the first studies to look specifically at stress and parenting, according to the researchers. The findings point to the corrosive effects of poverty or depression on an individual's physiology and help to explain why people feel and act the way they do when faced with ongoing psychological or economic pressure, she says.

"Stress is not just in our heads, it's in our bodies," says Sturge-Apple.

This is also the first study to measure physiological stress response in real time, says Fred Rogosch, research director at the University of Rochester's Mt. Hope Family Center and a fellow author on the paper. Participants' reactions were captured using a novel wireless electrocardiograph (ECG) monitor developed for the study by University of Rochester engineers Zeljko Ignjatovic and Wendi Heinzelman. The unobtrusive device allowed the team to analyze subtle changes in participants' heart rhythms as they were happening, providing a non-behavioral window into how the study moms were reacting. Other methods, such as measuring the stress hormone cortisol, require a 20-minute delay and are not nearly as precise, explains Rogosch.