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Early Childhood Neglect Associated With Altered Brain Structure, ADHD
vinces99 writes "Under the rule of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, thousands of Romanian children were placed in overcrowded orphanages with bleak conditions and minimal human contact, a legacy that continued even after the 1989 revolution. Only recently have research and public concern caused policy changes.
University of Washington research on children who began life in these institutions shows that early childhood neglect is associated with changes in brain structure. A paper published this month in Biological Psychiatry shows that children who spent their early years in these institutions have thinner brain tissue in cortical areas that correspond to impulse control and attention. "These differences suggest a way that the early care environment has dramatic and lasting effects for children's functioning," said lead author Katie McLaughlin, a UW assistant professor of psychology.
Since 2000, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project has worked to document and treat the children's health. McLaughlin joined the team about six years ago to focus on brain development. This study is among the first in any setting to document how social deprivation in early life affects the thickness of the cortex, the thin folded layer of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain. The study provides "very strong support" for a link between the early environment and ADHD, McLaughlin said.
University of Washington research on children who began life in these institutions shows that early childhood neglect is associated with changes in brain structure. A paper published this month in Biological Psychiatry shows that children who spent their early years in these institutions have thinner brain tissue in cortical areas that correspond to impulse control and attention. "These differences suggest a way that the early care environment has dramatic and lasting effects for children's functioning," said lead author Katie McLaughlin, a UW assistant professor of psychology.
Since 2000, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project has worked to document and treat the children's health. McLaughlin joined the team about six years ago to focus on brain development. This study is among the first in any setting to document how social deprivation in early life affects the thickness of the cortex, the thin folded layer of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain. The study provides "very strong support" for a link between the early environment and ADHD, McLaughlin said.
If you don't care for and train them early they will bite the hand that feeds them.
Just walk down any street in Chicago.......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Too many parents are wasting more time on facebook and other "social media" sites. At least with TV, the parents could sit on the couch and have the kid on their lap, so there was some contact. Facebook and twitter are sowing the next generation of facebook and twitter users with low attention spans.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
While human contact is very important in child development there might also be a least a couple or other contributing factors. Here are a few of possibilities;
1. Lack of proper nutrition. If the body is spending all it's food surviving there is little left to grow. It is well known thet the brain takes a lot of nutrition to grow.
2. Lack of exercise. If you don't use the motor parts of the brain they may not grow.
3. Lack of stimulating toys.
4. Lack of stimulating play.
There may be more or it may be all of the above. The study does not isolate any of these factors so there is no way to know which one is important. This looks like yet another study to prove a theory rather than test the theory.
Are people still getting ADHD ? Aren't they updating to AD4K these days.
Greenough showed the effects of enriched and deprived environments on cortical connectivity and thickness in a series of studies. This is one of his early studies:
Science. 1972 Jun 30;176(4042):1445-7. Rearing complexity affects branching of dendrites in the visual cortex of the rat. Volkmar FR, Greenough WT.
"Higher-order dendritic branching is considerably greater in Golgistained neurons from the occipital cortex of rats reared in groups in a complex environment than in similar neurons of littermates reared individually in laboratory cages have intermediate amounts of branching, while lower-order branching did not appear to be affected by any rearing environment."
And I believe correlation will be found with the lack of child rearing and the forcing of both parents working on the populace. Began with Reagan as I recall, and most certainly coincides with the continuos concentration of wealth in the upper class in this country.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Imagine if the opposite was true; if complete neglect and institutionalization was good for kids. Now that would be a real finding.
These results are interesting, but the experiment has no controls. Somehow, I doubt that typical child in an orphanage had typical parents with typical brains. Could it be that a part of the observed effect comes from the heritability of a thin neocortex, plus a correlation between parents having a thin neocortex and their children ending up in an orphanage?
If you leave a child in a room, with all the nutrition and proper shelter that they will ever need, by themselves, they will grow up to be mentally retarded. This article brings nothing new to the table. It is common knowledge that without human contact they will have hindered learning abilities, such as language and social development, such as the Feral kid who grew up with wolves and ran around on all four legs and couldn't learn to speak properly.
What we need are scientist who focus on positive outcomes, rather than the negative. What are the effects of creating interest for a child in lets say math, science, music, etc at a very early age? You may get a child prodigy, interest should be one of the highest priorities in school. Interest and potentiality are what create great minds, children have the highest potential versus a man who is in his 30's or even 20's, but first interest must be created before the potentiality can leap to higher levels. A child who has no interest in learning has no potential, but one who does can become the next Einstein.
There are always going to be neglected children, an article on neglected children isn't going to help neglected children or bad parents. Children spend more time at school then they do at home (in terms of interaction and creating self identity). Schooling is where, if anything, disorders such as ADHD arise. The primary education system needs improvement, not parents, because nothing can actually be done about parenting, there will ALWAYS be bad parents, but there could always be GOOD TEACHERS who could improve their lives.
What OP posted pretty much sums up what a bad scientist is, wasting time and resources on something that has little effect on helping the world
Decades ago there was an experiment with monkeys deprived of maternal support to varying degrees. Some not allowed to touch or see the mother. Autopsies showed that the deprived monkeys had massive (and obvious to any observer) brain deficiencies. These monkeys were never able to adjust to social settings with others of their kind. Their behavior was obviously abnormal. My impression was that every moment of their life was stressful for them. Sorry I can't recall the source of the video I saw.
This result would be the same for dogs, cats and humans. I can't comprehend why it would be news in the year 2014.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Not only is abuse a factor, but also basic critical factors missing from childhood such as emotionally stable adults. I've been studying this subject and working with kids (currently mentoring) for the last 5 years and it all fits, especially after meeting parents and observing how they treat and interact with their child. Check out author Gabor Mate and his books on stress, addiction, parenting, and ADHD. His lectures are all over youtube and his website is outstanding: drgabormate.com. I've handed out dozens of copies of his books to parents and it's made a difference in understanding not only ADHD, but the general mental health of children and what makes them behave as they do. If you are a parent I would urge you to check out this author, ideally before you kid reaches adolescence. Heads up!
This link will hopefully inspire your interest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGmADfU5HGU
This is a fairly core lecture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZNH7mvEgPA
And of course the author:
http://drgabormate.com/
ADHD was caused by a smothering mother and a distant father.
You talkin' to me?
Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well I'm the only one here ...
the Early Childhood Neglect Association is a non-profit
By now everybody knows that having a dumbfuck mother like Jenny McCarthy will give you autism...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
"The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog" contains stories about children who went through trauma, and recovered to a degree one would not have thought possible. One of the stories is about the indoctrinated children who were released from Waco, before the structure burned. Another story is about a child which spent about a year (as I recall) caged like an animal. Though disturbing, it's a fascinating look at childhood development and a fresh way of looking at how best to care for traumatized children and help them to be able to heal as much as possible.
"Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential -- and Endangered" is about how empathy is "learned", and why it is so essential.
Both books are by co-authors Dr. Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz. They are highly recommended for anyone working with traumatized children.
When we are born, we have no choice what home we are born into, or who our parents are. We may be born into wealth or poverty. We may have parents who treat us with care and tenderness; or we may have parents who don't know how to care for a child, have drug addictions, are incarcerated, are violent, or are mentally unstable. Some children are loved and kissed, while other children are severely neglected, beaten, or abused sexually. This is the lottery we all played. Most of us won. Some children lost.
Abused children are missing a part of their childhood. Where they should have received love, they received brutality or neglect. Because they missed out on a crucial part of their development, they are behind the other children. Children which have to be removed from their parents for their protection can sometimes be placed with family or a close friend. When this is not possible, they enter the foster care system.
In the foster care system, there may be many people involved in the child's life: parents, other family or friends, social workers, attorneys, therapists, doctors, educators, foster parents or group home staff, and hopefully a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) or Guardian ad Litem (GAL).
A CASA is a volunteer who is a constant adult presence in the child's life, which may be lacking other permanency. While social workers, group home staff, therapists, and doctors may work with many children, a CASA is assigned to a single child. The CASA meets with the child at least every other week, takes her out for activities or to eat, learns about her needs and circumstances, and uses this knowledge to advocate for her best interests.
Please consider volunteering as a CASA.
http://www.casaforchildren.org...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
We adopted our son a few years ago. When you're going through the process you're required to take classes where they prepare you for this. Romanian and Russian orphanages are so horrific we specifically ruled out adopting from those countries. It's a tough choice but you have to weigh your families ability to deal with huge amounts of stress and the financial burden of years of therapy, drugs, etc...
We adopted from Ethiopia, which is a country that's renowned how well they care for their orphans despite the poverty. I saw the care centers, and the people that ran them. They rival daycares here in the US and the workers hugged and cried with my son when he left. Even despite that, the lack of a true 1on1 relationship with a mother has had a significant impact on my son. With women especially, he fears they'll leave him. He acts out to get attention. His teachers need to do special 1on1 activities with him to reassure him. Give him special tasks, etc. It's tough but he's otherwise a great kid and definitely smarter than I was at that age. It's the biggest challenge I've ever had in my life. I couldn't imagine what the famillies of those Romanian children are going through. My hat is off to them.
One of the first things they have you watch is this study from the 1950s where they gave monkeys a Fake wire mother that had milk and cloth mother that did not:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Caution: it's emotionally disturbing to a lot of people.
The monkey would rather starve on the cloth comforting mother than eat on the wire mother.
And I can honestly say this is not new news for me. I've known all along that my parents neglect (Especially by my dad) contributed to my condition. I had at one point thought ADHD was due to sugar intake as well.. However, my kids have clearly proven me wrong there. The sugar may make them get out of control but I bring them back in line.
So glad we have a way to tell the "popular" rats from the geeks and nerd rat loners.
Or lack thereof?
So environment has a bigger influence that what we've measured in the Genome.
If only we tackled the less expensive solutions first.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Going AC on this for a reason,
I grew up with two alcoholic parents. Not the occasional drunks, or even funny drunks. But fucking mean, screaming, physical fights, cops called, parents arrested kind of drunks. I was always stressed and anxious as a kid, worried about the next blow up, embarrassed socially, hating my life, just wishing I was dead as a kid. Though I never tried to take my life, many days I just wanted it over.
This went on for a long time. From as early as I can remember to until they FINALLY got sober when I was 18, my parents were raging alcoholics. So pretty much ALL the important developmental phases, from childhood, through adolescence, just until college -- I was a wreck. Life in short pretty much sucked shit.
The only thing that saved me was they shipped me off to boarding school where some remarkable teachers and faculty took me under their wings, mentored me, modeled good adult behavior, and showed me what a normal life could be like. At least at boarding school I had structure (there is NO structure with 2 drunks, nothing you can count on, no one to rely on, no sense of security)
But that said, life has been a struggle for me as an adult (been treated on and off for depression, anxiety issues, battles ADHD my whole life -- not an easy thing to have as a software developer/programmer). I have little doubt, both because of my own experience, and what studies have shown, such as the effect of constant and intense stress on the brain -- that neglect like that can have permanent lasting, damage to the brain.
While my own story is certainly anecdotal, I've always felt a bit 'broken' as it were, and never felt like I could operate like 'most people' do... I think the years of hell did lasting damage, not just emotionally, but on a neurological level.
I'm from Romania.
The trouble with orphanage systems here *was* that they were seriously understaffed. The caregivers even tied the little children to their beds in order to not to have to look out after them very much. Little children's development (until about 6 years of age) is not psychological but psychomotric, so as long as they were limited in movement the same was happening to their brains. I would put the results of the study on this fact. I hope this no longer happens anywhere in the world, because the result is handicapped people.
---> Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Why yes, that was exactly what I was going for, for effect. So instead, just imagine the title and the following in all caps...
Hey you!
Look over here!
Pay attention to me!
Watch me do a flip!
Now I'm eating worms!
Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turd and twat!
TV show reference!
Oh I should watch that show!
The show's intro is taking too long! Now I'm bored!!!
Watch me run around in circles!
Oooo video games!
This game is boring!
Now I'm screaming even louder!!!
Given all of that, I can see how the subtext could be "mommy and daddy never paid attention to me :(".
I'm surprised it wasn't obvious to everyone that neglect led to that kind of behavior.
But I guess nothing is so obvious that researchers won't study it.
Social media is much to new. My generation was on teh bleeding edge of that and we're only now getting round to having children. It'll be another 5 years before you can see any effects from our negligence as parents.
Video games might match up better.
Didn't they already try to blame Autism on this? The whole 'Refrigerator Mom' thing...