Sonic Health

Stress is the result of a child is faced with difficulties, diseases, violence, poverty, and lack of healthy relationships.

It will either disappear into the rubbish heap of well-meaning but ill-timed social treatises or mark the beginning of a new age of activism by the physicians who care for the nation’s children: the American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday issued a technical report linking “toxic stress” in childhood to a lifetime of mental, intellectual and physical ills, and called on pediatricians “to catalyze fundamental change in early childhood policy and services.”

The  academy’s policy statement, released Monday in the journal Pediatrics draws on a growing body of research on genetics, child development, the brain and social behavior to show that children who face adversity are likely to become unhealthy adults plagued by problems that include poor literacy, substance abuse, failed relationships and poverty. An accompanying technical report reviews in particular detail the evidence that when a child’s “fight or flight” response to adversity is engaged repeatedly throughout childhood, his brain develops in ways that can impair judgment, learning and future responses to stress.

And the harm doesn’t stop there: The technical report cites “strong scientific consensus” that a child’s extreme or ongoing experience of neglect, domestic violence, parental substance abuse or a mother’s chronic depression can nudge his or her basic genetic endowment in negative directions that are carried into the next generation and beyond. The “ecobiodevelopmental” perspective that this new body of research offers tells pediatricians that, as guardians of children’s health, they are also shaping… continue reading

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