Study aims to determine health impacts of stress on children throughout COVID-19

By Taylor Pace

Researchers at the University of Guelph and McMaster University want to know how stress is associated with health outcomes in young children. 

They received funding for the project, dubbed the Family Stress Study, in 2019, and were ready to launch by March 12, 2020. But just a few days later, the province shut down because of the pandemic. 

“It was sort of interesting timing, because, of course, all of us entered into one of the most stressful times for families, all together, through COVID,” the study’s primary investigator, Jess Haines said. 

They had to pause the study until July, when they developed a contact-free way to continue. 

“But the interesting thing is we are then able to explore what stress looks like for families during COVID-19, and how that's impacting the kids. Although, originally, it wasn't our intention,” she said.

The study will run for five and a half years, and they are hoping to follow families over the course of three years. So far, they have about 270 families with pre-school aged children who have signed up and finished their baseline survey, though they are accepting new families into the study until the new year. 

They initially expanded the study to Hamilton to engage experts at McMaster University and enhance the generalizability of the study. But once the study went online, they further expanded their reach to Wellington County, Milton, and Waterloo Region. 

Haines is a trained nutritionist and a professor of applied nutrition at the University of Guelph. 

Since 2014, she has been the co-director of the Guelph Family Health Study (GFHS), which aims to understand early life risk factors related to chronic disease outcomes in families with young children. 

They began by considering dietary intake, sleep patterns, physical activity, and screen time as risk factors for children. 

While doing this work, Haines and her team noticed that after completing the surveys, parents would want to discuss their kids' behaviours, as well as their own, and share the kinds of stressors they were experiencing at the time. 

“They wanted us to know the context [of the behaviours]. ‘We have a family member who's very sick. That's taking up a lot of our time; we have just moved homes, and that's been quite stressful.’ And so that got us acknowledging [that] there's something else going on here, and families wanted to tell us about that,” she said. 

The GFHS is partnered with Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health, who has also been looking at early life stressors, and the impacts they can have on adults.

When stressful childhood experiences have long-term health outcomes on adults, they are referred to as adverse childhood events, or ACES.

Through their work together, they thought it would be interesting to explore what’s happening to young children in their everyday lives, and how those things could impact their health later on. 

To explore this question, in the Family Stress Study, they are looking at how stress influences the health behaviours of parents of young kids and their families, and how those behaviours could influence later health outcomes. 

Parents complete an online survey about the stressors that exist at home, as well as their family’s health behaviours. They will also continuously measure their children’s height and weight to track their growth. 

“This study is looking at not only behavioural impacts of stress, but we also know stress can affect stress response in the body. So we're also measuring cortisol, which is a hormone that is released in stressful times,” she said.

To track the release of cortisol, parents take a few strands of hair from the back of the head, put them in a bag and send it back to the Family Stress Study team. 

“And then the other thing we have the kids do is wear an accelerometer on their waistband, which is just a small computer that measures their movement as well as their sleep.” 

The goal of the study is to better understand how stress is impacting children; how it impacts their health behaviours, their growth, and their overall wellness, and then to determine how families can be better supported to alleviate some of that stress. 

So are there particular families that have higher stress levels than others? And what can we do to support them, so that in addition to allowing them to manage their stress better, we can see better health outcomes in their children,” she said. 

“We've seen that for kids, experiencing stress early in life can lead to them engaging in less healthful behaviours.”

So if a child is stressed, or a family is experiencing some kind of crisis in the home, like a death or financial issues, family meals might be less frequent, kids might have more screen time because there's too much to manage. 

“So some of those health behaviours may be lower in families that have high levels of stress,” she said. “So we're hoping by understanding that association, and understanding who seems to be affected most by which stress exposures, we can help figure out who we can target in our interventions, and how we can support families so that even in stressful times, we can support some of those healthy behaviours.”

The findings and plans for intervention will be passed along to Public Health, as well as adopted by some of the team members who are actively supporting families in their line of work. 

To find out more, visit the Family Stress Study website

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