But differences abound as well, and over the past months I've had many "Ah-hah" moments about how dysfunctional behaviors get started. I've had some insight into how Numbers 14:18 really works "The Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." These insights relate to what childhood trauma does to a person, and why this is a huge problem in our society.
Trauma is a hot topic right now in the social sciences and medicine alike. Post-traumatic stress is being researched intensely, and some disturbing findings are coming out about the effects of intense stress on the brain. Our genetics plus our experiences make each brain unique–good experiences make good things happen in the brain, and it is no surprise that trauma causes lasting harm to the developing brain. When trauma (especially physical and sexual abuse) is ongoing during the formative years, the area of the left brain (hippocampus) that processes logic and memory is decreased in size. Neglect causes different maladaptive changes in many areas of the brain. Fear causes sensitization of the “fight or flight” system so that it is activated upon the smallest stimuli. Together, they look like this: a child who can’t figure out what is going on in class, can’t remember what page he's supposed to be on nor figure out the answers to the problems that are being asked., who can’t hold still, whose auditory processing centers don’t really work well enough to figure out what people are saying, who thus becomes known as a stupid kid to classmates and a problem child to teachers. The spiral effect is that he treats others the way he’s treated, becomes mean, gets into trouble, and ends up in a juvenile detention center and worse as his life goes on. If the mistreated child is a girl, she will more likely internalize the trauma and/or neglect as low self-esteem and anxiety, leading to hypervigilance (an inability to relax and feel safe), eating disorders, and depression.
Why do some children recover from trauma and others do not? Again genetics comes into play, but perhaps a more important factor is the support system that is in place or lacking. We've all experienced trauma, emotional or physical–or both together, as when we tripped in the hall in middle school and all the kids laughed at us. If you've got a friend near-by who helps you up, tells the kids to be quiet, and asks you if you’re hurt, your brain quickly de-escalates from alarm to recovery, and the lasting effects are nullified. But if you must struggle on through the day without comfort and go home to parents who are fighting and throwing things, you’ll stay in the hyper-arousal state, and the neural response patterns gradually become encoded in your brain. Over time the “state” becomes a “trait,” and this will shape the course of your life.
Trauma certainly affects learning, so what do the specific learning deficits look like? Reading is a combination of many things including exposure to the world of words, being able to see and hear and put the sights and sounds together, remembering what you've just read long enough to associate it with a developing story-line, etc. A traumatized child will often have excellent visual memory, since he’s accustomed to being ever on the look-out for signs of danger. Abuse is most often chaotic and unpredictable, and he is forever memorizing circumstances in which danger has occurred in the past. This can lead to him being able to memorize sight words quite easily, and he may be actually a fairly good reader. But it is whole-language rather than phonics: he cannot learn the rules that govern how words are put together and decode new words. He can be an excellent speller if allowed to see the words and memorize them, but if presented with new words with the same roots, he’s at a loss.
But it is math that’s really startling. These kids can often count just fine, know the ordinal numbers and the names of the coins, but cannot tell you if 9 is more or less than 8. They can write their numbers up to 100 in nice neat rows and columns but don’t “get it” that 16 means 1 ten and 6 units. No matter how many times you tell them, no matter how many ways you show them, with drawings and manipulatives of all sorts. Next time they see it, they have no idea again. They can memorize math facts, like the doubles, and may write that 7 + 7 = 14, but next they write that 9 + 3 = 27 or something. Number sense lives in the part of the brain that is missing–it’s completely gone, and without it a child can memorize all day but will never be able to figure anything out. If the problem isn't written exactly like it was memorized, he has no idea what to do.
To protect the privacy of my foster kids, I cannot say exactly how much of this I’ve observed and how much I’ve learned in other forums (like the excellent video by Cheryl Weitz). But the moral of the story is this: when children are raised in a chaotic environment they have a chaotic brain to deal with all their lives. This leads them to become adults who make bad choices, which leads to another generation of children’s brains damaged, before they have a chance to see who they might have become. The “iniquity of the fathers” and mothers continues on–as families fall apart, children are unprotected, their needs are not met, they are not nurtured because the adults are too consumed with their own needs. Yes, there are exceptions, like Ben Carson, and poor, illiterate, single mothers can do an adequate job of protecting their children from trauma IF they are lucky. But the vast majority of impoverished children live with single mothers, and poverty and trauma go hand-in-hand. There can be some recovery in a very supportive environment with ongoing trauma therapy, but for those severely affected, the prognosis is not good.
I am glad to see that there is an increasing awareness of the long-term effects of trauma. I am sad that “it takes a village” of social workers, policemen, health care and mental health professionals, school staff and foster parents to do the job that could have been done much better by an intact family. Even with all the support, the children are still broken, a shadow of what they could have been, and all the time spent with therapists is stolen from the precious, limited hours of their passing childhood.
