An anonymous reader here forwarded an
excellent article, The
Two Year Window from last year's The New Republic (December 1, 2011), which offers
an example of the effects of nurturing on brainwaves in children and
the damage that occurs during harsh conditions and neglect (access
the full article as a
pdf HERE). I'm very grateful for the concise presentation, as it
saves me quite a bit of writing! (And I'm grateful to whoever went
to the effort of forwarding me a copy of the article.) A related editorial at The New Republic website offers some additional
supporting material, but I have consistently been unable to get the
link to work.
At the outset, I would like to point
out that the brain is a most “plastic” or mold-able organ and can
develop and reroute neural pathways, rewiring itself, but the early
years of childhood are critically important as this article
demonstrates quite well.
The article details the study of
children in orphanages in Romania, and one of the assessment tools
they used to evaluate children was their brainwave development. A
Harvard neuroscientist visited a Romanian orphanage and noted that
none of the children there cried. [This is notable, as this also describes how children trained with Pearl-like Methods or the ones once employed by the Great Commission group can respond.] They just stared at the ceiling
and were silent. As noted in the article, Nelson observed that when
you learn that there's no one to hear and respond to a cry, babies
stop crying. Though it was ten years after the fall of the Iron
Curtain, the country still valued the idea of institutions to
“warehouse” children in orphanages while they also banned birth
control and pregnancy termination. The orphanages were overrun with
neglected children.
Nelson, with help from associates from
Harvard, Tulane, and the University of Maryland persuaded the government to initiate an unprecedented study of the institutionalized children through what they deemed the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. The conditions were so consistently similar in all of the orphanages, and they compared their development with children that they arranged with the government to place in foster care (which was not the norm in Romania, as they preferred the “warehouse” model for orphans). Without harming children, they could then at least study the conditions of restraint and neglect in the orphanages as compared to the more attentive care within a foster family.
The New Republic article first points
out the issue of telomere length, lets call them a component of
chromosomes. One of the areas of cancer research involves the study
of telomere length, as shortened telomeres are connected to the
disease, and it is also believed to be a predictor of mental health
problems. The children who were raised in orphanages past the age of
two years had substantially shortened telomere length, meaning that
the care in the orphanage was not just difficult, it actually changes
“the architecture of the brain” in those children. Telomere
length may also be an early indicator if not a precipitating factor
in the development of the diseases discussed in this post at
Overcoming
Botkin Syndrome, as many areas of research now seek to elucidate.
The afterword of Hillary McFarland's Quivering Daughters also notes
the role of cortisol in the development of stress related disease,
and the New Republic article also discusses this as a mediator of a
multitude of health problems.
Though Nelson's team still actively
studyies the children and the data collected about them, they also
elucidated other very clear information (as quoted from the article):
Childhood adversity can damage the brain as surely as inhaling toxic substances or absorbing a blow to the head can. And after the age of two, much of that damage can be difficult to repair, even for children who go on to receive the nurturing they were denied in their early years.
The article also goes on to talk about
the stress response and its effects on brain development, one of the
many of the topics discussed recently on this blog. It points out
that experiencing a stress response on a chronic basis forms abnormal
brain pathways and also develops an enlarged amygdala which is
responsible for generating anxiety, one of the structures that
becomes overactive in PTSD. In addition to noting the diminished
planning ability, cognitive flexibility, memory problems and other
factors that also correlate with lower IQ scores. The article also
aptly notes:
McEwen’s work showed, among other things, that persistently high levels of cortisol altered the structure of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in forming memories and providing context for emotional reactions. Eventually McEwen introduced a term, “allostatic load,” to describe what was happening when stress hormones in- undated the body for extended periods of time. Subsequent research showed that persistent childhood stress also leads to significant physical problems, such as far higher rates of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, as Paul Tough explained in an elegant New Yorker article in March.
In another
article at Overcoming Botkin Syndrome, I also briefly discuss
some Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) which is now considered a
form of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This condtion results from a
trauma which is thought to occur prior to age four because of its
effects on brain development. Read more there to see some of the
difficult challenges faced by the adult who develops BPD in childhood
and how it affects their own ability to parent. Early childhood
trauma permanently inhibits the development of the brain structure
responsible for transferring short term memory into long term memory
(the hippocampus)
which creates one of the most problematic and notable elements of
BPD.
The article also goes on to describe
the implications for society and advocates for greater spending for
young families who are disadvantaged, calculating the actual return
on financial investments for at risk populations.
But most notably, since I mentioned EEG
assessments in this previous post about child development and adults
exposed to trauma and thought reform, I find this graphic mostinteresting and is worth a thousand words.
As the title of the article
demonstrates, if a child is spared the trauma of the lack of nurture
prior to the age of two years, the child's brain develops well and
they are able to enjoy normal mental development thereafter. If they
remain in the orphanage or are placed in care after age two, the
child suffers functional and structural developmental deficits as the
EEG data reflects.
This should tell us a great deal about
the effects of spanking and aggressive discipline practices used
against children. The practice results in life long illness and
deficits in mental development and physical health, something that is
not just limited to an emotional response. This information is also
echoed in sources I've noted here previously including John
Bradshaw's Culture
of Virtue and other authors like Allan
Schore. Michael Pearl might be training parents to raise
compliant children who will respond to the biggest thug in the room
with the biggest paddle, but children who survive death under his
methods will develop life long mental and physical limitations and
disorders as a consequence.
