Grant: Project Grant

Preschoolers are exposed to many stressful situations at home and daycare. This is especially true for children who manifest disruptive behaviours or live in low-income neighbourhoods. Sources of stress include fights for a toy with a sibling or peers, exclusion from games at daycare, and harsh discipline from parents. Repeated and prolonged stress may result in unusually high levels of the "stress hormone" cortisol. Chronically elevated cortisol can have damaging effects on the developing brain, affecting later health and social functioning. It is therefore in the public interest to reduce chronic stress in preschoolers while they are learning social skills essential to have harmonious relationships with others later in life. Our project proposes to test whether two interventions can reduce chronic stress in preschoolers and which one is the best. One is the training of daycare educators for a program that uses a puppet to promote social skills and positive relationships between children at daycare. The other is group training for parents promoting positive parenting practices. Each intervention will be provided over a period of one year and 3 months. We will measure cortisol levels in hair before and twice after the interventions. Our study is paired with the already funded I-CARE trial that will be conducted to reduce behaviour problems in 80 daycares in low-income neighbourhoods in the Montreal and Sherbrooke regions (1280 2-4 year-olds). From our pilot study, we expect that the interventions will reduce chronic stress and improve social behaviour. Results will advance knowledge on child development and how prevention programs work. Our findings will also document which intervention works best and for whom, which could help allocating more effectively our limited resources.