Little kids who live in stressful family situations often have too little or too much cortisol, a hormone that can have toxic effects on the brain.
A study of 201 low-income mother-child pairs conducted at Mt. Hope Family Center in Rochester, New York, tracked the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in children at ages 2, 3, and 4.
The findings show that specific forms of family adversity are linked to both elevated and low levels of cortisol in children. Kids with either elevated or low cortisol levels showed lower than average cognitive ability at age 4.
“What we were interested in seeing is whether specific risk factors of children living in poverty might be related to children’s cortisol levels,” said lead author Jennifer Suor, a Ph.D candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Rochester. “Then we looked to see if the hormone levels are predictive of significant differences in the children’s ability to think.”
