By Carrie DePasquale, Emmy Reilly, & Megan Gunnar
Dr. Megan Gunnar and her students in the Gunnar Lab for Developmental Psychobiology Research work to give back to the community. One of the organizations they support with their research is the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery (GMCN). The GMCN was created to reduce child abuse and neglect by providing highly stressed parents with a place they could go to get respite care for their children when they really needed relief, no questions asked. The Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, located in South Minneapolis, provides 72-hour crisis care for children aged birth to 6 years in Hennepin County. This means that parents encountering a crisis can bring their children to the Crisis Nursery for 3 days of trauma-informed overnight care, ensuring that their children are safe and cared for while they manage whatever crisis led them to seek care. They can do this up to 10 times (i.e., 30 days) in a calendar year.
This is an immensely important resource available to families who have inadequate social and economic support systems. Children in these families have typically experienced significant stress and trauma throughout their lives, and the Nursery can help buffer children from experiencing the worst of a current crisis. For the past several years, Dr. Gunnar and her graduate students, Carrie DePasquale, Emmy Reilly, and Mariann Howland, have partnered with the Nursery to provide research support towards their goal of continuously improving their program quality. This ensures that children will get the best possible support during their stay at the Nursery.
Inspired by earlier mindfulness studies conducted by former Gunnar “Labbies” Jamie Lawler (now a professor at Eastern Michigan State University), Elisa Esposito (now a professor at Widener University, Pennsylvania), and Anna Johnson (now a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Olaf) the team implemented and evaluated the impact of mindfulness stress-reduction strategies on children’s stress regulation at the Nursery. For six months at the beginning of the project, Dr. Gunnar and her students measured behaviors before any children’s mindful stress-reduction techniques were implemented. These strategies included belly breathing and calming while watching pieces of glitter settle in a snow-globe-like “mind jar”. After introducing mindful stress-reduction strategies as part of the daily routine in the Nursery, it was discovered that the addition of these strategies to all the other wonderful regulatory practices used in the Nursery was associated with improvements in self-regulatory behavior and increased use of adaptive coping skills, which is shown in Figure 1, and Nursery staff rated the strategies as effective at least 60% of the time.
Furthermore, Dr. Gunnar and her team have shared brief information sheets with Nursery parents about the strategies that worked best with their children, which have been well-received.
“My work with the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery has been incredibly important to me, because I recognize the value of translating science to practice as quickly and as effectively as possible. The Crisis Nursery shares my passion for continuous improvement of the services provided to the community based on the best available scientific evidence. Furthermore, the relationship and trust the Crisis Nursery has cultivated with the local community is second to none. I have very much appreciated the opportunity to work with such an amazing organization, to translate my program of research and that of others to directly benefit the children and families of Hennepin County who need it most.” – Carrie DePasquale
Although it is not certain that these changes in the children’s behavior can be attributed only to the stress-reduction strategies, their simplicity and potential for improving children’s ability to cope with daily stressors is heartening. These stress-reduction methods have since been incorporated in the Nursery’s training materials to better support how young children manage self-regulation skills despite exposure to adversity.
Over the past decade, the GMCN has created, implemented, and continuously adapted a program of trauma-informed care- the Nursery Way- based on the latest research on parent-child relationships, nurturing caregiving, and the impacts of trauma on child development. The GMCN leadership staff have extensive anecdotal evidence that the Nursery Way benefits staff and child well-being and with research support from Dr. Megan Gunnar and graduate students Emmy Reilly and Carrie DePasquale, the Nursery Way will be exported to other crisis nurseries and overnight family care centers to both extend the benefits of this trauma-informed care program to more children and families and to test the effectiveness of the Nursery Way in a waitlist-control intervention study.
In addition to respite care, the Nursery also supports a 24/7 crisis line and a home visiting program. COVID-19 has created many challenges for the Nursery, which they are facing with creativity. It has also increased the stress on families, as such the work the nursery does to support families is needed now more than ever. The Nursery has had to suspend its on-site volunteer program, meaning the Gunnar lab is not on-site now, but they are hopeful that when it is safe to go back, they will be able to continue contributing to the work of this important community organization.
“In my role at the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, I have been able to participate in a mutually beneficial research-practitioner partnership in action. Providing research support for the nursery’s mindfulness initiatives brings me closer to the children and staff at the nursery, bringing me joy everytime I enter the nursery and bringing me closer to the real reasons for my research- improving the lives of children and families facing adversity. Working at the nursery brings my research full circle as I see in action the knowledge gained from research on early adversity. At the same time, I get to directly support an important community institution in their endeavors to reduce child abuse and neglect and ease the stress facing local families with young children. My time at the nursery has further deepened my appreciation of the power of compassion in the lives of those facing obstacles; the children blossom under the compassionate care of the nursery staff.” – Emmy Reilly
Want to use stress-reduction techniques with your children? Try taking deep “belly breaths” with your child and doing a body scan. While breathing, draw attention to each part of their body (from their nose to their toes!) and ask your child how it feels.
Photo (left to right): Emmy Reilly, Mary Pat Lee (Executive Director of GMCN), Molly Kenney (Strategic Initiatives Director and our main contact at GMCN), Carrie DePasquale and Lisa O’Brien (Chair of the board and graduate of ICD) at Harvard last year attending the Frontiers of Innovation workshop.
