> https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted. 2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career. 3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.
Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
Academic concerns may not by themselves count as trauma, but combined with other factors they can be the thing that pushes someone into total hopelessness.
Plus almost everyone can get into a college, there is only really competition for a handful of elite schools. My college wanted SAT scores for admission, I did not take the SAT, they still admitted me without question. As long as you don't fail out your first two semesters in a row most colleges don't give two craps about your highschool performance.
12-14 was rough.
School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/
Things like abuse, neglect, natural disasters, basically anything that can cause trauma or significant stress.
Be a toddler and your mom's new boyfriend abuses both of you? Congrats, you brain has developed in a way that will not be conducive at all to your future, because instead of developing a functional reward system, you've developed a specific hyperawareness to manage the difficulty of living around one kind of abuser. This incredibly specific adaptation will of course, not prevent you from being an easy target for an entirely different type of abuser in high school.
(It's actually not that simple of course. Multiple ACEs are predictive of future troubles, not just one, so it's more like "A child who lives in an environment of constant stress, fear, and pain is likely to have a brain that didn't develop well" with a direction of effect unstated)
This is one reason why things like abuse and poverty are so damn cyclical. Your parents grew up in poverty and with abusive parents, so they have an elevated chance to abuse their children, and on and on and on.
This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids, and in the US, it also eliminates the horrific humiliation machine we've built around paying for school lunch, which might not be the best way to raise kids anyway.
By society, I mean every one of us that plans to grow old instead of an early death.
Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three or ideally more generations of well adjusted people that grew up not fearful of hunger, nor lack of basic shelter, medical care?
Also, providing quality child care for any time the parent(s) are working frees up quality workers to do that... though a better work life balance would also help society.
Treating 16 to 18 year old like 5 year olds is not the right way to go about it.
>> More than half of the world’s children are exposed to early-life stress from abuse, household dysfunction such as violence or drug use, or other traumatic experiences
The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.
Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.
If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.
This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”
Yes, and it (or at least one of them) has now been found. Maybe you don't care about knowledge for its own sake, but as the "irritating" press release goes on to point out,
“There are currently no treatments for what early-life stress does to the brain, partially because we have not had a clear picture of what molecular mechanisms to target,” Peña said. “This work is exciting because it reveals a clear mechanism, and also helps explain why the impact of stress is both latent and broad.
That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.