Nicholas Kristoff, at left, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning, Oregon native whose columns for The New York Times often focus on human rights abuses and social injustices, wrote recently, "A Poverty Solution that Starts with a Hug." Kristoff's piece is based on what he calls a "landmark warning", a policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics that toxic stress early in life, or even before birth, can harm children for life.
An excerpt:
This “policy statement” ... is based on two decades of scientific research...and has revolutionary implications for medicine and for how we can more effectively chip away at poverty and crime.
This new research addresses an uncomfortable truth: Poverty is difficult to overcome partly because of self-destructive behaviors. Children from poor homes often shine, but others may skip school, abuse narcotics, break the law, and have trouble settling down in a marriage and a job. Then their children may replicate this pattern.
The implication is that the most cost-effective window to bring about change isn’t high school or even kindergarten — although much greater efforts are needed in schools as well — but in the early years of life, or even before birth.
Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect — a child cries without being cuddled. Affection seems to defuse toxic stress — keep those hugs and lullabies coming! — suggesting that the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.
Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body’s metabolism or the architecture of the brain.
The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they are more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.
One successful example of early intervention is home visitation by childcare experts, like those from the Nurse-Family Partnership. At age 6, children are only one-third as likely to have behavioral or intellectual problems At age 15, the children are less than half as likely to have been arrested...
Reported for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.
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