Nontoxic Family Stress: Potential Benefits and Underlying Biology

Special Issue Guest Editor's Note: In this article the authors discuss potential benefits of normative exposure to stress in children's daily lives, emphasizing development of emotion regulation and coping and functioning of the neuroendocrine and immune systems. In the paired article, "Work-Family Conflict and Health Among Working Parents: Potential Linkages for Family Science and Social Neuroscience" (this issue, pp. 176-190), Grzywacz and Smith examine the stress-based, biobehavioral framework underlying paid work, parenting, and health research and then summarize selected areas of social neuroscience research with a focus on stress and health research as having the potential to further our understanding of how different work-family experiences should be conceived as "stressors" and, if so, how they may get "under the skin" to affect health outcomes.Repeated exposure to chronic stressors like family violence can be detrimental to the mental and physical health of children (Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002). But these models can be taken too far when extended down in a linear fashion to normative levels of stress exposure. Mild and moderate levels of stress do not necessarily have the same effects on health and development as do high levels of chronic stress, only at a lower level of magnitude. Figure 1 depicts a theoretical inverted U-shaped curve that may better approximate the effects of stress on child development.Thex axisdepictslevelsofexposure,ranging from "very low" to "very high," that reflect a combination of the intensity, frequency, and duration of multiple stressors. Increasing exposure is associated with a decline in functioning only on the right side of the figure, after crossing the midpoint. Most children experience stressors that fall within the broad center of the continuum, where there is a much flatter association with health and development. Although children are potentially exposed to many sources of stress both inside and outside of the home, which can have additive and multiplicative effects, in this article we focus primarily on family stressors. Our goals are to outline potential benefits of exposures to levels of family stress that are in the low to medium range, as well as to review the major biological stress-response systems and the possibilities of showing tolerable responses to high levels of stress.In this article we discuss two, partially overlapping, levels of stress exposure that we have labeled normative and moderate. In our use of the term, a normative level of stress spreads across the low-to-medium range of the x axis in Figure 1. It encompasses daily experiences with common family interactions and events that generate brief, mild expressions of negative affect (e.g., parent-child conflict, family demands, parental disappointment and associated feelings of irritability, frustration, disappointment, and sadness) and occasional events that are more stressful but not outside the ordinary realm of life (e.g., witnessing arguments between parents). We define moderate levels of stress exposure as spanning the medium-to-high sections of the x axis. This is also a very wide range; it includes chronically stressful conditions, such as growing up in neighborhoods with high crime rates, and stressful events, such as parental arguments that recur on a frequent basis, as well as events that are not normative, such as parental divorce. Moderate levels of stress exposure can be associated with poor developmental and health outcomes; our analysis highlights the role of protective factors in these settings.We are concerned with the effects that normative and moderate levels of stress have on the developing child's biological and psychological stress response systems. As we will discuss, normative stressors typically elicit what some have called a "positive" stress response; moderate stressors usually generate more intense emotional and physiological reactions but, under certain supportive conditions, can elicit a "tolerable" stress response (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2005/2014). …