PHILADELPHIA – A 10-minute, daily stress management intervention delivered in an elementary school classroom can decrease feelings of anxiety and improve a child's ability to relax, Dr. Denise Bothe said at the annual meeting of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
“The technique was adopted by many of the children who continued to use it in their daily lives to help them cope with stressful circumstances,” said Dr. Bothe, a fellow in the division of behavioral pediatrics and psychology at the Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland.
Dr. Bothe and her colleagues conducted a pilot study of stress management techniques among third graders. The stress management intervention was 10 minutes long: It involved deep breathing, movements for stretching and focus, and a 5-minute script with imagery read by the teacher. The intervention was performed daily for 4 months by the classroom teacher.
In the control group, the teacher read aloud to the class out of a children's storybook for the same time each day for 10 minutes.
Two third-grade classes were randomly assigned to receive either the stress management intervention or the control activity. From the two classes, researchers were able to obtain parental consent for 15 children to participate in the intervention and 13 children to participate in the control group.
Data anxiety, heart rate variability, and academic performance were collected immediately before the intervention, after 4 months, and 1 year after the intervention began, Dr. Bothe said.
Children in the control group showed no significant changes in a self-report anxiety scale across the three time periods. But in the intervention group, there was a significant drop in anxiety levels right after the intervention, which continued at the 1-year end point. The mean total anxiety T scores in the intervention group were 49.2 at baseline, 43 after the 4-month intervention, and 41.9 at 1 year after baseline.
The researchers also evaluated relaxation using heart rate variability. The control group children did not show an increase in their ability to relax. The intervention group showed an increase in heart rate variability from baseline to 4 months and a statistically significant improvement between baseline and 1 year.
The intervention did not appear to have any impact on academic performance, which was measured using math test grades and proficiency scores, Dr. Bothe said.
The researchers also collected qualitative data from the teacher and students who participated in the intervention class. The teacher said the intervention helped to settle the children and helped them to relax. The teacher also reported that after the 10-minute intervention, the children seemed ready to return to work. And some of the children used the breathing exercises before the test, Dr. Bothe said.
Students also reported benefits from the daily stress management intervention. Nearly all the students (13 of 15) said it helped them during the school day, and 12 of 15 said they used the techniques outside of school.