Children benefit from parents' mastery of stress

Stress is a power word. It is so descriptive. It is onomatopoeia personified. It mouths its meaning. The word stress is like howl or snarl or scream. Just the sound makes the blood pressure kick up or a heart race. It is not only the bark of stress but the bite that affects every cell of the body.

Biological stress is the survival response against perceived threats. However, being always at battle stations or continuously on red alert erodes the internal wires and frays the nerves. Combat fatigue is not isolated to soldiers shooting. Therefore, to live and not just survive, the body needs homeostasis or balance. What emotionally goes up must emotionally come down, and what is emotionally down must emotionally come up.

If there is frequent, unpredicted, intense stress the organism falters. That is why play is serious work that lowers the internal tension. Fun, dreams, friends and calm also counterbalance stress. For the body, life is a delicate equilibrium of forces. It is the presence of pressure and its discharge. Feeling good is tension-release. It is: "Why do we hit our heads on the wall ... because it feels so good when we stop."

Roller coasters and scary movies provide the same high physical tension, then let it go when the ride ends or the show is over. Sexual pleasure is excitation, then release; soothing a crying child is similar. In fact in the relationship with an infant, the mother, if she does it right, sculptures the immature nervous system of the newborn to become regulated to this up and down, stimulation and calming. The sympathetic nervous system is kept in check and counterweighted by the down regulation of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system.

This developing yin and yang of the brain is the principle reason why babies are born. Well, that and they have run out of space and the mother is about to pop. But other than that, fetuses are physically completely built in 40 weeks minus a few. The closer the gestational burden gets to term, the more the fetus needs to be looking at its mother, not the inside of the uterus. Only outside of the womb can the newborn learn the stimulation of environmental stress and the soothing of the mother.

It is this critical synapse-building time, when the infant is held captive by the imposed immobility of immaturity, that the mother intimately responds to the babe; and looking and sharing feelings with the child teaches stress management. When the tension of hunger, cold, fatigue, fear and pain goes up, the mother instructs with her presence and sensitivity that there is an end to the stress. By correctly reading the signals, then acting, the mother ends the hunger, warms against the chill, rocks the fatigue to sleep, cuddles the fears and soothes the pain. She creates for the evolving brain the neural pathways to future and forever calming.

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