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Lesson Summary
Lesson Summary
This lesson introduces the stress response system and building resilience.
Key Understandings
Key Understandings
Parents understand the connection between stress and brain development.
Parents understand the three types of stress and resilience as a response to stress.
BEFORE: Engage in Learning
BEFORE: Engage in Learning
What is stress?
What is stress?
Watch the video on toxic stress and reflect on the following questions:
What is stress?
What are the effects of toxic stress?
DURING: Explore new concepts
DURING: Explore new concepts
According to Harvard's Center on the Developing Child, it is important to distinguish among three kinds of responses to stress responses: positive, tolerable, and toxic.
The stress response is our body’s natural reaction to stressful events. The brain becomes aware of a potential threat and sends signals to the body to prepare for a potential need to take action: fight, flight (run away) or freeze (shut down).
A key contributor to the development of a healthy stress response system for young children is the support they receive from the adults in their lives.
The center provides the following descriptions of each type of stress response system:
Positive Stress Response
Positive Stress Response
This is a normal part of healthy development. It can cause brief increases in heart rate and mild elevations in hormone levels. Some situations that might trigger a positive stress response are the first day with a new caregiver or receiving an injected immunization.
Tolerable Stress Response
Tolerable Stress Response
This activates the body’s alert systems to a greater degree as a result of more severe, longer-lasting difficulties, such as the loss of a loved one, a natural disaster, or a frightening injury. If the activation is time-limited and buffered by relationships with adults who help the child adapt, the brain and other organs recover from what might otherwise be damaging effects.
Toxic Stress Response
Toxic Stress Response
This can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.
Managing Stress
Managing Stress
When a healthy environment is provided, children are more likely to be emotionally and physically healthy:
Teaching children to act and think positively when they are faced with a situation to manage the stress before it becomes overwhelming.
Spending time together as a family and ensuring that a child knows that their feelings are valued.
Modeling strategies for how to react to stress in a healthy way.
A Stress Log
A Stress Log
Keeping a stress log helps you to identify sources of stress, your reactions, and how you manage your response. Making the most of keeping a log involves:
• Recording stress related information over a period of time,
• Reviewing the information you gather, and
• Identifying strengths, challenges, and next steps to improve how you manage stress.
Ultimately, this process will help you to manage stress and take care of yourself.
Activity Keeping a Stress Log.pdfAFTER: Extend your learning
AFTER: Extend your learning
Preventing and Addressing Toxic Stress
Preventing and Addressing Toxic Stress
Resilience
Resilience
The science of resilience can help us understand why some children do well despite serious adversity. Resilience is a combination of protective factors that enable people to adapt in the face of serious hardship, and is essential to ensuring that children who experience adversity can still become healthy, productive citizens.
Watch this video to learn about the fundamentals of resilience, which is built through interactions between children and their environments.
Stress and Resilience - what can we do about toxic stress?
Stress and Resilience - what can we do about toxic stress?
Watch this video on how stress affects us and what parents can do about it.
Exit Ticket: Final Reflection
Exit Ticket: Final Reflection
Reflect on what you learned in this lesson.
Answer the questions in the exit ticket:
3 thing you learned
2 ways you will implement or apply what you learned
1 question you still have
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