Children’s Stress Across the Transition From Preschool to School Predicting the Development of Anxiety Symptoms

• In Event: Transitions in Early Childhood: Longitudinal Links to Later Internalizing Symptoms

Abstract

Previous studies showed that children experiencing maladjustment during the transition from preschool to school could further develop internalizing disorders, such as anxiety (Carter et al., 2010). Children’s sensitivity to stress is a good indicator of children’s adjustment, but atypical sensitivity, measured by cortisol concentrations, was often linked to later development of anxiety symptoms (Koss and Gunnar, 2018). Our previous study (Leblond et al., 2022) showed that most children’s morning cortisol concentrations increased during the first two weeks of kindergarten, and that the adaptation response rate varied between children two months after school entry. However, individual differences in those stress responses could moderate the vulnerability to anxiety symptoms among children. Previous studies partially support those hypotheses, but do not establish functional correlates and follow children unregularly and for short periods of time. The current study aimed to test whether children’s atypical morning cortisol (very high or low) concentration across the transition to kindergarten was associated with an increase in anxiety symptoms 1.5 years later.

To address our objective, 384 children (52% girls), recruited from two cohorts of a pregnancy study, were followed across the transition to kindergarten. Parents took morning salivary cortisol samples from their children (30 minutes after awakening) at four different time points across the transition (one sample for each of the four time-points). Cortisol concentrations were assessed once before school entry in mid-August (t1) and three times after school entry at first (t2) and second week (t3) of school, then two months after school entry in November (t4). Anxiety symptoms were measured twice, before kindergarten entry and in first grade, by parent-report questionnaires. Regarding the analyses, a latent growth model was used to model morning cortisol concentrations during the transition. The anxiety symptoms items were combined using latent variables, one for each time-point. At last, the growth factors of the cortisol model were associated with anxiety symptoms in first grade as an outcome, controlling for symptoms before entry.

The latent growth factors showed most children demonstrated an increasing (linear slope, M = 0.11, p < .01; variance = 0.10, p = .37), then decreasing (quadratic slope, M = -0.13, p < .01; variance = 0.11, p = .28) trajectory of cortisol concentrations across the school transition, but that on average children varied significantly in their levels of cortisol concentrations at school entry (intercept; M = 0.34, p < .01; variance = 0.01 p < .01). Thus, when the anxiety symptoms were added to our model, cortisol level during the first week of school negatively predicted the development of anxiety symptoms 1.5 years later (β = -0.18). However, changes in cortisol levels across the transition, either increase or decrease, did not add to the prediction.

This study showed that low morning stress response to an imminent normative environmental stressor was followed by increased levels of anxiety symptoms. Consistent with the stress sensitization hypothesis, this lower stress response is frequently linked to anxiety problems in children who previously experienced adversity; this remains to be examined in this sample.

Authors

• Maggy Leblond, Université de Montréal (UdeM)
  Presenting Author

• Sophie Parent, Université de Montréal

• Natalie Castellanos Ryan, Université de Montréal

• Sonia Lupien, Université de Montréal

• William D. Fraser, Université de Sherbrooke

• Jean Richard Seguin, Université de Montréal