Stressed four-year-olds 'fret for months about starting school'

Researchers say exposure to such prolonged stress could saddle children with long-term health problems.

And the stress could be rubbing off on the youngsters from over-anxious parents, according to the experts behind the government-funded report.

While pushy parents have long been blamed for burdening their offspring with high expectations, the claim that children as young as four could be suffering is a worrying development.

For the study, academics from the universities of Bath and Bristol measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the saliva of 105 four-year-olds.

At the start of term, average cortisol levels were 5.47 nanograms per millilitre of saliva, expectedly high in a natural response to a new situation.

Six months on, as the children became used to their new surroundings, this had fallen to normal levels of 1.42ng/ml.

However, the readings from three to six months before the start of school also showed alarmingly heightened cortisol levels of 4.48ng/ml, more than three times the normal amount.

Bath University's Dr Julie Turner-Cobb, who led the study, said: "This suggests that stress levels in anticipation of starting school begin to rise much earlier than we expected."

She surmised that "stress was being passed on to the children" by parents worried about how their offspring would cope.

Warning that this was likely to induce a "more long-term stress response that could lead to poorer health", Dr Turner-Cobb said parents should do all they could to make the transition to school a calm and happy one.

Perhaps unusually, the study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, indicated that shy children were likely to be less stressed by starting school.

Outgoing children displayed higher cortisol levels at the start of term, and were more likely to still have high levels after six months.

This was "possibly because their more impulsive nature gets them into more confrontational situations", said Dr Turner-Cobb.

These children were, however, less likely to catch colds in the six months after starting school and took fewer days off when they did fall ill.

The researchers believe this shows that, although damaging in the long term, higher stress levels provide some short-term protection against colds and flu.