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Childhood Stress Leaves Genetic Scars
sciencehabit writes "Traumatic experiences in early life can leave emotional scars. But a new study suggests that violence in childhood may leave a genetic mark as well. Researchers have found that children who are physically abused and bullied tend to have shorter telomeres — structures at the tips of chromosomes whose shrinkage has been linked to aging and disease."
Child abuse isn't taken seriously? Here in the states, child services can take your kid away from you if you so much as look at it wrong in public.
A study (http://www.pnas.org/content/109/17/6490.full) was published in PNAS today showing how low-ranking monkeys have worse immune systems than high-ranking monkeys. (In monkey societies, 'high-ranking' is a euphemism for bully.) We've known for a long time that subordinate monkeys have worse health and live shorter lives in general than dominant monkeys, but this is one of the first studies that describe how this actually happens, genetically and physiologically.
Spanking can also help stop a kid from doing something that ends up being even more traumatic.
Unless it happens on school grounds. Then people turn a blind eye.
Especially if other kids are doing it. Then the school administration gives their silent consent by doing nothing about it. Or worse, when it's physical abuse, they punish both the bully who attacked someone without provocation and the one who defended himself, just to add that element of mindfuck to existing injustice.
I am thankful to have had parents who told me I would not be in trouble for legitimate self-defense even if the school system was far less reasonable. What I found was that if you knock out one of them, the rest tend to leave you alone, for the nature of a bully is to find a doormat who will not fight back. I believe the school officials who have no doubt studied child psychology and the like are also aware of this and understand the injustice they facilitate. It is not mere bureaucratic ignorance but some kind of desired effect, a sort of unwritten portion of the curriculum.
People who can and will stand up for themselves, even when a price must be paid, are extremely undesirable to increasingly tyrannical governments. It's something they would discourage and it is not difficult to understand why. It's amazing how hard that is to accept for people who cannot comprehend that organizations, like individuals, can also be selfish and encourage only what is in their long-term interests.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's already known that stress can seem to accelerate aging. Ever see those pictures of presidents before a term, then after? 4 years passed for everybody else, but it looks like they aged 10 years.
Psyche and soma are not fully distinguishable.
Actually, if you RTFA you would know that the measurement only applied to two or more kinds of violence exposure. Thus, the occasional spanking without other forms of violence would not qualify as harmful under this study.
Sorry, but that opinion is not healthy. Abuse is abuse, but on occasion a parent (assuming they are actually parenting) will have limits tested beyond any other punishment. Normally, I see your type of comment from one of two kinds of people.
1. Those that have no children so have no idea what parenting is.
2. Parents who's children are monsters that have no respect for any authority. Generally the parents are either ashamed or afraid to take the kids out in public, or the children are so poorly behaved that people don't want them in public.
Truth be told, I have spanked my son 2 times in his whole life. The first time he refused to stop what he was doing, refused any punishment (go to time out) and was doing something dangerous. The second time, he was a bit older. He refused punishment and took a swing at me.
Now unlike when I was a kid and just got the shit kicked out of me with a belt, I explained to my kid on both occasions why I had to punish him and how we could not repeat those mistakes. He learned valuable lessons on both occasions. In my opinion, he learned valuable lessons from those occasions. He is going to be an adult soon, and one day may ask for advice when it comes to parenting. I really hope he remembers how he was raised or talks to me before he talks to someone like you.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Sometimes spanking is necessary. It isn't necessarily the first thing I would go to. It depends on the child's personality as well as their age. Also, the whole of the point of discipline and part of the point of raising a child is to modify behavior. I doubt anyone wants to have a jerk for a son.
Parents need to learn there are other ways to handle discipline and yes, aside from being damaging in yet another known way - previous revelations including lower test scores and greater aggression from children who have been spanked, spanking is the lazy way out. There are more effective, responsible means.
Timeouts for one, if done right and that is key, if done right, are absolutely better. Parents screw this one up by making them too long or delaying them. I for one always found a minute per year of age, given immediately at the time of the infraction regardless of where we were, done standing, done silent and done facing a wall, corner, tree, whatever was handy and followed with an explanation for the punishment and a directive for future behavior was very effective. So effective in fact I would find no need for their use within a couple weeks time. I had compliance.
Now I'll admit these weren't my children - rather I was a nanny for a great many years, and parents tend to have to be around their children a bit more than I had to, so perhaps adjustments would be necessary to maintain effectiveness. Or other avenues explored. My point is simply that there are other ways and they can be much more effective, if done right.
"Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
That doesn't at all address the parent, you're just changing the subject.
Yes, there is a difference between spanking and beating the crap out of a kid. There's also a difference between beating the crap out of a kid and quadruple-amputating him for no sound medical reason, but that doesn't make beating the crap out of a kid okay.
Rather than speak to differences between thing X and an obviously worse thing Y, you should clarify why thing X is not a bad thing on its own merits.
Indeed.
Don't put disinfectant on that scrape on your kid's knee, because it stings.
Don't take him in for surgery because there will be post-op pain--after all, the doctor abused him by cutting him open. How is this still legal, in this day and age?!
The examples above are cases in which the end justifies the means. I think that there are better ways to discipline most children than spanking, but equating a spanking given by a clearly responsible and loving parent with slapping a kid because he blocked your view of the television is incredibly simplistic. There is an argument to be had about whether or not spanking can be categorized with my examples above, and it's one I'm interested in, but your position is untenable.
Your brain is not a computer.
The ideal therapy would involve determining the probability of a dangerous mutation then resizing all the telomeres accordingly. You don't want excessively long telomeres (it's an intentional self-destruct mechanism for preventing a cell damaged over time from becoming malignant) just as you don't want telomeres being too short.
Cancer cells are not necessarily ones with over-long telomeres - typically what happens is that the cell's mechanism for shortening the telomeres breaks so that the cell can replicate forever. That doesn't, however, mean that it will or that the replication will occur in a timeframe that's of any significance. You'd have to have additional damage to cell mechanisms for that. If you can modify telomere length on-the-fly, the easiest one is to shorten all the telomeres in a person to something that'll only allow a few copies, then close to the deadline lengthen them just a little. That way, if a cell goes nuts and replicates excessively prior to the telomere system breaking, it'll suicide before it reaches the point of being able to replicate forever.
A better option, though considerably further into the future, would be to modify the repair mechanism in DNA to be rather more reliable. The better-able DNA is at fixing damage, the longer you can make the telomeres without it causing harm. As it stands, the mechanism has limited value. So much so that mtDNA has no such mechanism at all and can handle such a state just fine.
Of course, it helps that mitochondrial DNA is much shorter. The current nucleic DNA is a combination of the original nucleic DNA plus a lot of DNA from symbiotic organisms that became part of the cell and eventually became part of the nucleus, PLUS a great many retroviruses. Perhaps 8-10% of nucleic DNA is from fossil viruses (some still active) and according to recent studies perhaps another 40% is from other external sources.
It aught to be possible to take a fully-sequenced (and I MEAN fully-sequenced) human genome and optimize it. There'll be plenty of genes that belong to fossil lifeforms that serve no useful purpose as far as the human host and the microflora within the host are concerned. (That's over 5,500 lifeforms, so you've got to be very sure of these things.) Decrufting and compacting the human genome would likely reduce the risk of dangerous mutations. It may be that replacing the central DNA core with an XNA core would also help, but I saw nothing in that article about whether XNA molecules have the capacity to unwind properly and replicate, only that XNA had been constructed and was able to carry the same base pairs. This solution is in the FAR future (Star Trek timeframe at best) but there's nothing there that breaks any known rule. We can already do some of the steps, the main reason I'm putting it 500+ years in the future is that the problem space grows exponentially with the number of genes and even quantum computers aren't going to have sufficient power to handle a space that large for a very very long time. If ever. GM is unpredictable enough when adding/deleting single genes, but compacting DNA would involve wholesale rewrites of the genetic code.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Forget the organizational level for a second, and consider on a human level. Officials working for schools and depend on them to put food on the table would have to understand that authoritarian regimes tend to target and eliminate education.
Target and eliminate? No. They aren't that stupid (would that they were). What they do is pervert education and use it for the purpose of social engineering and indoctrination. Any transmission of knowledge or understanding is incidental and only to the extent necessary that the peons/students can perform useful labor, to form the bottom of the pyramid. They would also encourage conformity and permit various bullying and other abuses to ensure that the immaturities of childhood extend well into adulthood. What they absolutely would not do is teach serious, tough-minded critical thinking skills and raise up people who can educate themselves and do not need to depend on an instructor to tell them what is important to learn.
Sounds just like what we have now in the USA. These things happen slowly from the perspective of a human life, but quickly from the perspective of written history. Just consider how much the USA has changed in the last three generations. Then you can get a feel for what's going on, where it is headed, what the ultimate expression of it would be, and why it would be done that way.
The USA's tyranny is not going to be hard tyranny, the kind that waves a gun in your face and demands that you submit. It is going to be a soft tyranny, the kind that knows what's best for you, that you have learned to depend on. That, however, is just a matter of style, the means. The result is the same.
I have to ask, were you trolling or did you truly not understand that? What real tyrants understand is that the average person is so caught up in their day-to-day affairs that they tend not to be long-term thinkers. They are not skilled at seeing the path something is taking and projecting what the end of that path will be and that skill is not taught to them and they are not self-educators who would acquire it on their own. So if you want to implement tyranny, you do it in baby steps, each one carefully justified and defended by its ardent little apologists. After all, you don't want the terrorists to win, do you? After all, you want to protect the children, don't you? After all, you want the poor to be taken care of, don't you?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Cats, however, take a stepped-on tail as an unforgivable, grievous insult against their Gods. Which are themselves, incidentally.
I doubt anyone wants to have a jerk for a son.
I disagree; I'm sure countless Americans would want that. Everyone wants kids that grow up to be just like themselves.
It used to be taught that environmental factors during an organism's lifetime (malnutrition, etc.) did not have an effect on the genetic heritage of offspring (you get a "clean slate" of DNA, so to speak). [...] But here we are with a study that says environmental factors can leave a genetic mark.
The study was about somatic cells, eg "body cells" that make up the specialized tissues of your body. Your offspring are formed from germ cells, found in your gonads, and consequently your offspring can only inherit DNA from your germ cells, but never your somatic cells (except in the case of cloning or other artificial techniques).
Telomeres are the "endcaps" of chromosomal DNA. Every time a chromosome is copied, a small portion at the ends of the chromosome get "left off" of the copy, which limits the number of time a cell can divide before the telomeres are consumed and functional DNA segments begin to be deleted. This (usually) prevents cells from reproducing in an uncontrolled fashion, and it's one of your body's main defenses against cancer. That's how it works in somatic cells.
Germ cells, on the other hand, can express a ribozyme called "telomerase," which can bind to the ends of a chromosome and extend the telomeres. This is why animals can reproduce indefinitely even though 99% of their cells are "mortal." (As others have pointed out, when a somatic cell begins to express telomerase it's usually cancer.)
The upshot of all of this is that shortened telomeres in your somatic cells will have no direct effect on your offspring. This particular study in no way supports the idea that environmental factors are responsible for genetic changes in offspring. Your post is therefore ill-informed even if your thesis is correct ("almost everything they teach in American public school is either wrong or simplified to the point of uselessness?").
To rectify your error, your homework assignment for tonight is to study the enzymes called "telomerase" and "reverse transcriptase," followed by learning the "central dogma of biology."
Dismissed.
While I do not personally use spanking, I think that categorizing it as being for "an adult who knows no other options or who chooses not to take the time needed to solve the situation" is incorrect.
Parents, in the mini society we call the family, perform the role of government. If we, as adults, do things like use violence and intimidation to get our way we will find the police using state sanctioned violence against us. I personally think smacking is an appropriate response to violent, bullying behavior in children and most kids will try that out at some stage. It is better for society that we learn this lesson at the hands of our parents as children rather than at the hands of police as an adult. I do note that it isn't the only method I'd recommend to correct bullying.
Additionally, sometimes behavior correction needs to be immediate. Where disobedience will lead to the child's life being in danger taking "the time needed to solve the situation otherwise" could be interpreted as neglect. If you are in a situation where you need to correct behavior right now, smacking could be the best option.
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I went to primary school in the 60's and throught those 6yrs there was an girl in my level to whom nature had not been kind. ALL the other kids would yell "Allison's germs" and run away when she approached them in the schoolyard. It didn't help that her parents sent her to school with dirty clothes and oily hair, this just reinforced her status as the lepoar of the schoolyard. Sometimes she used their fear against them by delibertely following them, or steal their marbles by chasing them away. These 'attacks' often ended with her falling to the ground in tears. I'd like to say I befreinded her but I too saw the germs and not the Allison.
Everyone remebers what happened to them in the schoolyard, it's much harder to remeber what you did to others. It's neither an remedy or an excuse for this behaviour but I beleive the Stanford prison experiments clearly demonstrated what old time religion had intuitvely known about human nature from day one, how did 'middle class' germans willingly become death camp gaurds, and why are kids so cruel? - Stable, strong societies survive, the "golden rule" found in most societies and religions combined with resrtricing the definition of "others" is a powerful stabalizing force, war against non-others is a powerful strenghtening force.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Historically, authoritarian regimes - the hard sort, have targeted education for elimination - perhaps not for the entire population, but large portions. The most glaring example would be Mao's China - but that really wasn't my reference.
Any others?
The USSR had great educational systems; they taught people to be physicists, rocket engineers, classical musicians, gymnasts, etc. No, they didn't teach people to be independent thinkers, but they poured lots of resources into higher education that benefited the state.
North Korea is about as authoritarian as they come, and they certainly are working hard to produce scientists and engineers to build them bombs and rockets.
Nazi Germany was certainly authoritarian, yet they had higher education too. How do you think they produced so many aeronautical engineers and rocket scientists?
Mao's China was really an exception, as Mao was a very stupid man who was basically an anti-intellectual farm worker who led a revolution and then forced his idiotic ideas on everyone, which led to the "Great Leap Forward" which was really a great leap backwards and resulted in countless people starving to death. He wanted to get rid of all "intellectuals" (anyone with an education) and basically make it a country of uneducated workers. China suffered greatly under his leadership, and only got better once other people took over. China's current leaders only pay lip service to Mao, and don't follow his methods at all; most of them are actually engineers.
Education is very important to authoritarian regimes, because it allows them to impose a particular school of thought on the entire population from the top down.
Funding is being cut on all levels, class sizes are going up, teachers and the very concept of education are being regularly attacked by politicians, religious types, etc.
The religious types aren't authoritarians; they hate public education because, at least these days, it prevents them from indoctrinating everyone else's kids with their religious beliefs, so they're always working against it. If this weren't a pluralistic society, this wouldn't be the case. Go to any religious schools and see if the concept of education is being attacked there; it isn't, because the religious people have complete control over the instruction(/indoctrination).
Furthermore, the attacks on educational funding in this country aren't evidence of creeping authoritarianism; they're evidence that there's many different forces at work, and this one is working against centralized authoritarianism. What's going on in this country is really rather complicated; it's not like other nations' revolutionary times where some jerks rose up and seized power militarily and then started imposing their ideas on everyone, as seen in the early Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, Hitler's Germany, Napoleon's France, etc. One way you can see this is that there's no one person or small cabal in power at this time; Obama has a high office, but he's shown he isn't pulling any strings, but rather he's the puppet with his strings being pulled by various other interests. Furthermore, there's still a big division in power between the state and federal governments, with a lot of states openly challenging the federal government on various issues. If you want to boil things down, the main thing you can say is that the governments in this country (and more so at higher levels) are extremely corrupted by corporate influence. There's no single leader who's going to seize power like Stalin or Hitler or Napoleon; instead, various interests are going to be constantly fighting each other until the whole house of cards collapses.
I'm going to tell you boys and girls a story, and it's posted AC for the obvious reason (other than having lost my user/pass to a hard drive crash).
One of my mother's boyfriends used to smash my head into my brother's head, then he'd drag me off to my room by my head. On the way, he'd smash my head into the wall or a door, just for further punishment.
Just thinking about this makes me very, very angry. This same motherfucker also gave me tinnitus in both ears, because he used to DRAG me - a 5 year old boy - around by the ears whenever it suited him. I'm sure you can guess how that makes me feel,
I hate that worthless cunt. I recently found out that he's still alive, and still living in the same city as me. Now I'm 37, and I'm a big dude. He's still a skinny worthless fuck, and he'll be around 60. Should I choose to, I could revenge myself upon him with little effort.
I'm also quite sure that you can't imagine how tempted I am to do that. Whenever I think about it, my blood burns like fire.
The same dirty piece of shit went out of his way to ruin everything he could for my brother and I. I distinctly remember Christmas 1981, when he woke the pair of us up after 10pm, and made us clean our room up. He also told us, in the tone of voice that I still know to this day means a beating was coming my way, that we were to go and tell our mother what we were doing and why.
Why did he do this? Because she was wrapping Christmas presents. His goal was to ruin Christmas for us. Fortunately, because of my earlier childhood, I could live in my own little world of denial where what I knew was kept completely apart from what I wanted to be true.
Know what my mother did about the abuse? Absolutely nothing. That bipolar bitch also behaved abusively - she would sometimes beat us with a power cord if she was angry.
Does physical abuse permanently impact on people's lives? Hell yes. My life is a mixture of anger, depression, and escapism. I have a high IQ, but I spent my life being beaten up or knocked back by the woman who was supposed to protect me. I'm stupid, lazy, worthless, and so on. Resultantly, I'm essentially unable to apply myself for any length of time. Years of abuse have seen to that.
It wasn't just physical, though. It was mental, too. With her being bipolar, well, I hope it's sufficient to say that when my partner starts screaming in anger about anything, I snap and become extremely aggressive almost immediately. I won't hit her, although I do find myself falling into verbal abuse all too often. Some times I can stop that for a significant period of time. Then again, my partner once decided that she was going to make me angry. It took her three days of constant insults and screaming, a punch or five thrown my way, and all sorts of threats. I couldn't leave, because every time I tried to she would block my way out threatening to call the police and tell them I'd attacked her if I even pushed her aside. When I finally snapped, I think I destroyed half the furniture, computer keyboards, anything I could get at with ease - did I mention that I'm a very big guy? - inside the house in around 20 minutes. It took her days to clean up the mess, and she was crying and shaking when she realised she'd made me angry. She kept trying to calm me down at the time, but it was too late.
Once, I could barely make it through a day without suicidal thoughts. It took me years to break that cycle. Now, it still happens on a weekly basis, but I can swing back into daily. I've been out of it for a few months now, but as I type that, I think I'm heading into another bout in the near future.
I've just been promoted at work. A much higher level of responsibility, and a good deal of power and influence within the business. (I can actually decide the way things are done, what things need to be done, and often by whom. I just nee
Mama Bear: To those parents that are completely anti-spanking... hey, good luck with that. Technically, a timeout is a short period of solitary confinement, which itself deemed torture, cruel, and unusual... So before you go overboard and compare a measured spanking to beating a child... just remember, you still torture them with solitary confinement, so what makes you parent of the year, eh? ;) I'm sure a few of these velvet glovers will turn out wonderful kids. I'm also sure they will put their child so high on a pedestal to scar their unique little snowflakes in worse ways.
Papa Bear: On the other hand, if a parent ever has to hit, leave a mark, turn something red, or use something other than the palm of their own hand, they're going to far. To that kind of parent: You are bigger, stronger, and in control. For you to use a hanger, belt, stick, wooden spoon, knuckes or other hard part of the body, or anything else on a child is abuse! You're beating your child to quench your anger, not teach a lesson.
Baby Bear: Appropriate measure and balance. My son will be 4 this summer. I'm adamant about teaching him not to grab from the counter, but let's say he goes to grab a knife. I will slap the back of his hand or his bottom (after taking the knife from him calmly, of course). This isn't time to "negotiate". My son permanently injuring himself will receive a swift sting somewhere. He's a small child. He's smart, but appealing to his intellect is completely wrong when it comes to immediate danger. He doesn't run into traffic in a parking lot. He doesn't grab at the stove. He doesn't put coins in his mouth. The key is being consistent, and rare. I think the more you spank, and the harder you spank, work against you. I don't want my child resenting me, or thinking I'm out to hurt him. If he does, then I've failed. But if he gets hit by a car, I've definitely failed!
Very rarely do I ever have to spank for another reason, and that's usually if he refuses to stand in timeout. It's measured, not harsh (I am rougher when he and I are rough housing and playing... so its more embarrassing than anything), and I give him lots of warnings. If I say what the consequence will be, I always follow up. Parents that threaten punishment, and don't follow through do their kids a huge injustice just as if they continually promised ice cream for dessert, and never deliver on that either. Parents that punish without explanation are causing more problems than if they did nothing.
Any form of punishment is followed by having him explain what he did that caused the punishment ("I got a time out because I didn't listen when you told me to put up my toys."), followed by me adding explanations for why what he did was wrong, followed by a big hug, wiping of any tears, a kiss on the cheek, and telling him to go up to anyone he was bad to and apologize.
My son, is healthy, happy, knows he's loved, and is a very sweet and polite boy. He's not mean to animals or other kids. Most of the time, I've found talking quietly and firmly to my son ends all that tantrum business while shopping.
I8-D