• Why early experience matters: Videos of scientists teach you

    July 29, 2018 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Attachment 4 Comments

    Scholars know so much about the importance of early experience–you should too!

    A 2010 symposium brought together anthropologists, clinical, developmental and neuro-scientists to discuss early experience in light of evolution and human development. This is necessarily an interdisciplinary area of study because we have to know our history as social mammals, what optimizes our development in our sensitive early years and what undermines the development of a cooperative human nature. The talks are available for free online. Here is a sampling of the speakers with links.

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  • The fleeting childhood of U.S. border children

    July 29, 2018 By in Child trauma, Trauma 2 Comments

    By Darlene Byrne, Judge, 126th Judicial District Court
    The comments in this paper are solely the opinions of the writer and no other organization.  

    As a judge in Texas who has presided over many hundreds of child abuse and neglect cases since 2003, I have seen firsthand what the trauma of removing a child from a parent can do to the child. The parent-child relationship is one of our most sacred and precious fundamental and constitutional rights, as recognized by many U.S. and Texas Supreme Court cases.

    Sentencing innocent children at our U.S. borders, with instant removal from their parents with no notice, no warning, and no due process goes against the moral code of this nation. The events taking place at our southern border are no less traumatic for the affected children than cases in which a child is removed from their parents because of allegations of abuse and neglect.

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  • Study shows most pregnant women and their docs like ACEs screening

    July 19, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Solutions 1 Comment

    Would pregnant women participate in surveys from their doctors asking them about whether they had experienced trauma in their childhood? In surveying moms-to-be at two Northern California Kaiser sites, clinicians discovered that the women were receptive to filling out an adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey, according to a study that was published earlier this year in the Journal of Women’s Health.

    In fact, researchers found out that the vast majority of pregnant women — 91 percent of the 375 women— were “very or somewhat comfortable,” filling out the ACE survey. Even more, 93 percent, said that they were comfortable talking about the results with their doctors. The women were surveyed from March through June 2016 at Kaiser Permanente clinics in Antioch and Richmond, CA.

    ACE refers to the groundbreaking CDC/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study that tied 10 types of childhood trauma, including living with an alcoholic family member or experiencing verbal abuse from a parent, to a host of health consequences. (Got Your ACE Score?)

    The higher the number of ACEs that people have, researchers learned, markedly increases their risk for poor health outcomes, as well as social and economic consequences. Having four ACEs, for example, nearly doubles a person’s risk for heart disease and cancer, raises the risk of attempted suicides by 1200 percent and alcoholism by 700 percent.

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  • “Government-Sanctioned Child Abuse”: Separating Kids, Parents at Border

    June 25, 2018 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Attachment, Child trauma 1 Comment

    Government officials are doing irreparable harm to families seeking asylum. They are separating children from their families, no matter the age of the child.

    The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and over 200 other child welfare organizations, which have become increasingly sensitized to early life stress, have condemned the practice of child-parent separations. The head of the AAP, Colleen Kraft, has written an op-ed against it.

    She says: “Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claim they act solely “to protect the best interests of minor children.””

    Hardly. Is it ignorance or malice? We don’t know, but the justifications sound both ignorant and malicious.

    What ignorance are they displaying? Here is a short description:

    Human children are not like other animals. They are born so immature they look like fetuses of other animals till about 18 months of age. In the first years of life, children co-construct their biological and social capacities, organizing their basic features around the experiences they have.  The norms for our species is the evolved nest. One specific need that separation denies is physical affection from known caregivers. This need among social mammals like us was well documented by Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments. Young monkeys deprived of their mother’s touch developed into aggressive and autistic (socially awkward) individuals, never to recover.

    Extensive distress shifts development, undermining what otherwise develops in a loving supportive environment –biologically healthy systems and social engagement. Instead extensive distress enhances primitive survival mechanisms in ways that grow to harm self and others—e.g., the stress response becomes hyperreactive. Because the first years of life are so sensitive to experience, the individual may never recover to reach their full potential (although they may recover enough to survive—i.e., what is often called “resilience”).

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