Understanding cortisol reactivity across the day at child care: The potential buffering role of secure attachments to caregivers

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Abstract

Full-day center-based child care has been repeatedly associated with rising cortisol across the child care day. This study addressed the potential buffering role of attachment to mothers and lead teachers in 110 preschoolers while at child care. Using multi-level modeling and controlling for a number of child, family, and child care factors, children with more secure attachments to teachers were more likely to show falling cortisol across the child care day. Attachment to mothers interacted with child care quality, with buffering effects found for children with secure attachments attending higher quality child care. Implications for early childhood educators are discussed.

Highlights

► Full-day center-based child care has been repeatedly associated with rising cortisol across the child care day. ► This study addressed the potential buffering role of attachment to mothers and lead teachers in 110 preschoolers while at child care. ► Children with secure attachments to teachers were more likely to show falling cortisol across the child care day. ► Attachment to mothers interacted with child care quality, with buffering effects found for children with secure attachments attending higher quality child care.

Section snippets

Attachment

Attachment theory proposes that differences in the organization of the child's early attachment relationships will emerge as a result of differences in the nature and quality of the patterns of interactions with a caregiver over the first few years of life (Ainsworth and Wittig, 1969, Bowlby, 1969/1982, Bowlby, 1973, Bowlby, 1980). These differences support the construction of distinct working models of attachment relationships and the self that carry forward to subsequent relationships (

The current study

The overarching purpose of the current study was to assess the role of attachment security to parents and teachers as a potential buffer against cortisol reactivity at child care. However, we know that a number of other child, family, and child care factors are related both to the attachment relationships that children form with adults and to their experience of non-maternal child care. To improve our ability to discuss the unique role of attachment security, we utilized a demographically

Participants

Participants were enrolled in one of 14 classrooms from one of six full-day child care centers. To ensure adequate representation of understudied populations, centers serving Head Start eligible and ethnically and racially diverse families were targeted. Because previous work has utilized university-affiliated child care centers, one such site was also included in the sample. To reduce variability due to global classroom quality, centers with the resources and philosophy to support high-quality

Analytic plan

All analyses controlled for the effects of child and family demographic characteristics, teacher-reported temperament (surgency, negative affectivity, and effortful control), maternal depression, and time between morning and afternoon sampling. We further controlled for AM cortisol because we were predicting change scores and the amount of change may be dependent on AM cortisol values. We first explored whether attachment to mother predicted cortisol change score across the day at child care in

Attachment to mother and cortisol change scores using linear regression

A linear regression was performed to predict cortisol change scores on the basis of maternal security and the nine control variables (age, sex, demographic risk, surgency, negative affectivity, effortful control, maternal depression, time between sampling, and morning cortisol). The model accounted for 50% of the variance in cortisol change scores. As expected, average morning cortisol predicted cortisol change scores across the day, β = −.76, t (81) = −9.43, p < .001. In addition, age was a

The model-building procedure

The final model was derived in incremental steps (see Table 3). The first model (Model A) tested fixed effects for all study variables (control variables, as well as the key study variables). Age, AM cortisol, and teacher security emerged as the three significant correlates of the cortisol change. Next, a variance component (random effect) was added for each of the explanatory variables, one at a time; thus, testing whether the association between each variable and cortisol-change varies across

Discussion

This study examined characteristics of the child, their environment at home and at child care, and their dyadic relationships with their caregivers as predictors of stress reactivity at child care. We first assessed whether a secure attachment to the mother was associated with decreased risk for stress reactivity across the day at child care without including relationship security to teachers or global classroom quality. Attachment security to mother in this model was not predictive of cortisol

Maternal attachment and cortisol reactivity across the child care day

The null main effect for maternal security using linear regression was initially surprising given the previous laboratory (Gunnar et al., 1992, Nachmias et al., 1996) and naturalistic (Ahnert et al., 2004, Gunnar and Brodersen, 1992) findings indicating that children who are more securely attached to their mothers are least at risk for experiencing stress reactivity as assessed by salivary cortisol. However, only one of these studies (Gunnar et al., 1992) assessed cortisol reactivity in the

Attachment to lead teacher and cortisol reactivity across the child care day

Our data suggest that children with higher security scores with teachers were more likely to exhibit falling cortisol across the child care day even when controlling for a number of demographic, temperament, child care, and family characteristics, including maternal relationships and global classroom quality. This finding replicates the previous work examining stress reactivity and attachment with substitute caregivers (Gunnar et al., 1992) and suggests that, at least for preschoolers,

Additional findings

Of the nine controls used in this study, only age was a significant predictor of cortisol change score in our model. This finding is in line with previous work demonstrating that reactivity to child care is strongly influenced by the child's developmental level (Dettling et al., 1999, Watamura et al., 2003).

In addition to age, there was a positive trend for teacher-rated surgency to predict cortisol reactivity at child care. This finding mimics previous work examining temperament and stress

Limitations

There are several limitations of the current study that should be noted. First, although it has been shown that parents and teachers can be successfully trained to sort the Attachment Q-sort (De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997), future research should include independent assessments of the child. In particular, ratings completed by individuals within an attachment relationship may be more accurately viewed as the adult's perspective on their relationship with the child than a pure measure of

Conclusion

The findings from this study extend previous work examining cortisol reactivity in preschoolers attending full day child care. The data support previous findings that stress reactivity within this context is influenced by the age of the child. Further, they raise the possibility of interactions between maternal characteristics and classroom quality. The findings also suggest that cortisol changes across the day are related to the child's attachment security to their lead teacher. These results

Implications for caregivers and educators

This study and other similar work make explicit the importance of relationship quality for children's health and well-being. Further, they suggest that educating the whole child must involve socio-emotional support from caregivers. Children who must repeatedly utilize their body's stress management systems to manage the normative challenges of child care risk overexposure to potent hormones and possible negative consequences for physical and psychological health. These data clearly demonstrate

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    This work was supported, in part, by ACF grant (90YE0091-01) awarded to Lisa S. Badanes, NICHD grant (1 RO3 HD054718-01) and a grant from the Foundation for Child Development awarded to Sarah Enos Watamura.

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