Stress: Can it pass between parents and kids?
How does a parent’s stress at work impact their teen’s stress levels at home? Does the daily strain from meetings and deadlines pile up on parents and eventually cross over to their children, who battle their own daily pressures?
New research from Colorado State University shows that may be the case, but the health effects and family dynamics at play are difficult to fully outline.
The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, is built around the allostatic load model. That model describes how chronic exposure to stressors leads to wear and tear on the body, resulting in short-term psychological and physiological changes that, if left unchecked, can lay the groundwork for long-term disease. The researchers were interested in understanding how that load develops over a short amount of time and how stress can pass between family members.
The paper shows that stress can indeed pass back and forth between children and parents, especially as it piles up over a week. However, the team also found that pattern changed and shifted depending on the amounts and sources of stress reported by the participants. They also found that the pile-up of stress may be beneficial because it forces people to address it.
The work was led by Associate Professor Kimberly French in CSU’s Department of Psychology. French is the first author on the paper and an industrial organizational psychologist who studies how people juggle work and family responsibilities. She said the paper broadly expands our understanding of the allostatic load model – particularly as it relates to interpersonal family dynamics.
“We looked at the whole family system across an eight-day period,” French said. “There is great existing research into the negative health effects from short- and long-term stress, but this paper begins to now look at the middle period to understand how stressors compound over time in relation to your family’s overall situation and then begin to affect health aspects, such as physical pain and sleep.”
The team analyzed reports from 131 parent-child pairings who completed daily interviews by telephone about their physical aches and pains, sleep hours and quality, and key events. The team also analyzed daily cortisol levels collected through saliva samples.
Cortisol is the body’s primary stress hormone. Its release can help regulate response to stress by increasing blood sugar and improving focus, for example. The body naturally has a high amount of the hormone in the morning, which then tapers off during the day before it is refilled through the sleep cycle. Researchers used this natural downward slope throughout the day to measure how well participants were handling stress. A steep downward trend showed healthy activity, while a flat and constant level indicates the body may be stuck in a high stress state and unable to come down for sleep and recovery.
French said the results told a complex story about the relationships at play in the study. For both parents and teens, greater stressor pile-up each day was linked to more self-reported physical aches and pains, consistent with the team’s hypothesis. However, the team also found a parent’s nonwork stressor pile-up had a significant linear relationship to their cortisol levels, such that their slopes became steeper and healthier just as family-centric stressors began to pile up. That ran counter to the team’s original hypothesis that more stress would generally result in flatter, unhealthy slopes for all participants. French said it made some sense, though, as parents are likely to have built up healthy coping mechanisms to stress over time that support their overall resilience.
The team also found some evidence that people may recover as stress becomes extreme. “As parents’ stressors piled up, their teenagers reported fewer sleep hours and vice versa. As the stress continues to pile up, we see the opposite trend – that more stress is correlated with longer sleep,” French said. “We believe this shows an adaptive response. Once people get to extreme stress levels, they take preventative action – like seeking more sleep to recover.”
She added that the research shows stress can indeed pass between two family members, but that most of these effects are due to persistent stressor exposure, rather than daily changes in stress. For example, parents who reported more work stressors had teens with shallower cortisol slope and fewer sleep hours. That slope relationship plateaued and then reversed among parents with extremely high levels of work stressors, again showing that people may adapt at extremely high levels of stress.
“We know that prolonged exposure to stress results in negative health outcomes, but what seems less clear is the daily impact of stress at shorter time scales. It’s not straightforward. It depends on the degree of stress piling up – and even how it is measured,” she said. “It is a much more complex process than we may have thought and raises important questions for how we think about and track stress as it unfolds over time.”
The work holds many practical implications for employers and families looking to avoid the pileup of stress that can lead to long-term health problems. To that end, French said employers need to go beyond simple one-off stress management activities and instead work to address stressors that may hang over and accumulate over a longer period.
“This research points to the importance of work design. Our data suggest it is not so much day-to-day changes in stress that cause health issues. The chronic overload of employees seems much more important. Short breaks are not going to be enough to address that accumulation over time,” she said. “And with families, it is key to note that addressing stress in one family member, no matter where it is coming from, can positively impact others.”
French said the team will continue to investigate the ways stress shows up in individuals and contributes to the allostatic load. That may include efforts to better capture how stressor pile-up is captured or how family history mediates response. The team could also investigate the role of study length or different demographics such as low-income or nontraditional families.
“This research has raised questions about what pileup is and the best ways to measure it. I look forward to pursuing those topics as we try to understand how organizations can best be supportive of work and family needs,” she said.
