The Impact of Stress Literature Review

Stress affects children in many ways. From lacking confidence to developing eating disorders, to becoming antisocial, stress can take a toll on a child. Developing within an environment of stress and upheaval generates a sense of instability within children. When they are older, they may seek that stability or sense of stability in harmful activities or people. A good example of this is a child experiencing abuse at an early age and then marrying someone that abuses him or her.

The impact of stress on children can be great and often generates long-term side effects. Depression, personality disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, psychiatrists find these kinds of mental health problems frequently in children experiencing chronic stress. Some may not even appear from abuse, but rather from trying to please their parents and the people around them. Over achieving children may feel chronic stress because people expect him or her to rise above expectations constantly.

Five recent peer-reviewed articles will help elucidate the topic of stress in children; how it may influence their lives. These articles will be briefly reviewed and will highlight the information that shows negative or positive reactions from stress experienced by children. It cover five research questions listed below.

1. How does stress affect the emotional development of a child?

2. Does poverty play a role in childhood stress?

3. What kind of mental problems arise from stress in children?

4. How does stress affect the ability of a child to form relationships?

5. Does stress affect a child's learning habits?

Body

The first article is from 2011 and deals with ELS or Early Life Stress and its effect on the brain. While neurobiological and epidemiological studies paint a dismal image of negative outcomes, comparatively researchers have devoted little attention into incorporating the breadth of discoveries concerning possible emotional and cognitive shortfalls associated with ELS. Developing conclusions from longitudinal studies observing developmental routes of the brain in healthy samples could offer a new framework to comprehend mechanisms essential ELS sequelae. This was a weakness in the article because it made the first half-unnecessary to the main point and unclear. Lending more to the confusion was the two-fold nature of the objective.

The first part of the goal was to summarize evidence from longitudinal statistics on normative brain development. The information was derived from other sources as well. The second was to use this outline of normative brain development in order to understand changes in progressive trajectories related with deficits in cognitive as well as affective function subsequent ELS. Their results provided five principles concerning normative brain development, which the researchers identified and used to discourse neural and behavioral sequelae of ELS.

The results proved the article's strength and made the overall information useful. They found early adversity correlated with "deficits in a range of cognitive (cognitive performance, memory, and executive functioning) and affective (reward processing, processing of social and affective stimuli, and emotion regulation) functions" (Pechtel & Pizzagalli, 2011, p. 55).

The second article covers the topic of poverty and childhood stress. It begins with explaining children from impoverished backgrounds have to deal with more as they develop. For example, children from low-income households may live in substandard housing. They may have limited access to healthy food. They may experience malnourishment. They may even experience abuse from stressed out parents and other family members.

This is a very interesting article to read because it goes into topics that most researchers tend to not cover and looks at environmental causes of stress rather than the biological impact stress has on the brain. The article also mentions the idea that stress may accumulate over time and "short circuit" a child's ability to cope resulting in further stress and problems in the long-term. "As exposure to stressors accumulates, physiological response systems that are designed to handle relatively infrequent, acute environmental demands are overwhelmed. Chronic cumulative stressors also disrupt the self-regulatory processes that help children cope with external demands" (Evans & Kim, 2012, p. 43). The strengths lie in its unusual approach to explaining the impact of stress and which populations it may arise more frequently. The weaknesses lie in its lack of comparative literature and evidence that leads to this conclusion.

The third article covers mental health issues brought on by stress in childhood. Mental health issues can be the long-term consequence of prolonged stress, especially during child hood. The researchers also mention in addition, childhood stress mentions what kinds of mental health problems can arise. During a life cycle, children that experienced extreme stress and grew up experienced later on alcoholism, eating disorders, depression, cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses. "Stress is a known precipitant for metabolic and neurological diseases, with sensitive periods identified across the developmental continuum from conception to old age" (Koenig, Walker, Romeo & Lupien, 2011, p. 475).

Although the article was informative, it focused too much on biological impact. It did not detail specific coping mechanisms children use that could develop into mental health problems later on. An example of this would be how children emotionally eat in order to cope with fear and anxiety brought on by stress. The strengths of the article lie in its ability to uncover the idea that stress can influence negatively a child's life in the long-term and may lead to serious chronic diseases and health problems because of it. Stress can and frequently does cause mental health problems in children and later on as they become adults.

The fourth article discusses how stress in the form of social stress affects a child's ability to form relationships. Children exposed to stress early on often form harmful or destructive coping mechanisms. Some of which affect their ability to socialize properly and form relationships with others. This study showed physical effects of stress and its impairing ability in terms of socialization. "Only the performance ratings in HSA children worsened over the course of the following week and were related to more negative PEP. Thus, these results speak for the high clinical relevance dysfunctional PEP may have for the maintenance of social fears already in childhood" (Schmitz, Kramer & Tuschen-Caffier, 2011, p. 789).

Essentially, children develop social fears that carry over to impairing their ability to socialize. The article used language that was often overly complex and hard to understand. This is where the weakness lied. The strengths were in the article covering a topic that not many researchers cover in a way that promoted a better understanding of what children may go through in terms of stress and their impaired ability to socialize because of it. The article also highlights that social fears come from some negative experiences that carry over long-term.