Compassion training for parents may reduce their children’s stress

A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that the young children of parents who take part in a compassion-based training program develop lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol over time. Published recently in the Infant Mental Health Journal , the small preliminary study suggests that Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, a program of contemplative exercises designed to strengthen and sustain compassion toward self and others, could offer a parents a way to help their children lower their stress, says lead author Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, a clinical child psychologist and professor of human development and family studies in the School of Human Ecology (SoHE) at UW-Madison. "We know that mindfulness-based practices work for groups including expectant parents, mothers experiencing post-partum depression, and parents of older children," says co-author Charles L. Raison, also a professor of human development and family studies at SoHE and a professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine and Public Health. "We wanted to investigate whether a compassion-based practice might provide a similar opportunity to benefit the very young, whose minds are deeply impressionable and for whom chronic and toxic stress can impact their future stress reactivity and their physical development." Cortisol is a hormone related to stress and the body's response to a variety of physiologic factors such as hunger, fatigue and inflammation. It can be measured from hair samples collected from children and adults.