Why do different childhoods produce different adults? The reason is that the brain that you have as an adult was influenced during its construction by various childhood experiences. For example, lots of childhood stress damages construction of the frontal cortex, producing an adult less adept at helpful things like impulse control. Lots of exposure to testosterone early in life makes for the construction of a highly reactive amygdala, producing an adult more likely to respond aggressively to provocation.
The names are not important. What is important to appreciate is that there are areas in the brain that are very important to us deciding what counts as the right thing to do and all brains are constructed differently depending on their life experiences. Every aspect of your childhood, factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have. Childhood adversity increases the odds of an adult having depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse and also impairs learning and memory. There is also a greater chance of their indulging in antisocial behaviour, including violence; and being in relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood.
Some studies demonstrate that by age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the thinner the frontal cortex and the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control. Thus, if you are born in a poor family, your odds of success are automatically lowered. Some of the reasons why poverty reduces your chances of success are human specific — if you’re poor, you’re more likely to grow up near environmental toxins with the neighbourhood having more liquor stores than playgrounds; you’re less likely to attend a good school or have parents who can spend qualify time with you.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences, or “ACEs,” quiz asks a series of questions about common traumatic experiences that occur in early life. It is an indication of how lucky your childhood was. It will ask about things like abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. For each of these experienced, you get a point on the checklist, where the unluckiest have scores approaching a ten and the luckiest being around zero. It is found that for every step higher in one’s ACE score, there is roughly a 35 percent increase in the likelihood of adult antisocial behaviour, including violence; problems with impulse control; substance abuse; increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety disorders, poorer health and earlier death.
The opposite happens if you a have a high RLCE (Ridiculously Lucky Childhood Experiences) score. As a child, did you feel loved and safe in your family? Was your neighborhood crime-free, your family mentally healthy, your socioeconomic status reliable and good? Well then, you’d be a high-functioning adult. Children who have suffered from abuse or neglect in their early years grow up with a substantially higher risk of adult mental health problems than the general population. Often, the child grows up into an adult at high risk of depression, self-harm, drug abuse and suicide.
All these factors indicate adult potential and vulnerability, not inevitable destiny. There may be all sorts of problems in childhood. It has been found that childhood abuse increases the odds of being an abusive adult; witnessing violence raises the risk for PTSD; But despite such problems many individuals turn into reasonably functional adults with the childhood adversities seeming to have left no permanent scars. What explains such resilience?
What is important is the number of times a child suffers the whips and scorns of time and the number of factors that protects the child from trauma. If a child has been sexually abused OR has witnessed violence, the chances of it leading a normal adult life is better than if it had experienced both. If a child has experienced poverty, then the future prospects of the child are better if the family is stable and loving than broken and acrimonious. The more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy adulthood.
What happens when everything goes wrong — no mother or family, minimal peer interactions, malnutrition, etc? Take the example of the Romanian institution kids. In the 1980s the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu banned contraceptives and abortions and required women to bear at least five children. The result was that institutions soon filled with thousands of infants and kids abandoned by impoverished families. Many intended to reclaim the kids later when their financial situation improved. The kids thus lived in overwhelmed institutions, resulting in severe neglect and deprivation.
The story became widely known after Ceauşescu’s 1989 overthrow. The resulting international attention led to some improvements in the institutions and many kids were adopted by Westerners. Since then, all categories of children - children adopted in the West, those eventually returned to their families, and those who remained institutionalized - have been studied.
As adults, all these kids had low IQ, poor cognitive skills, problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic, anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis. When their brains were studied, they were found to have decreased size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Only the amygdala - a small, almond-shaped structure in the brain, one of its key functions being to control fear and anxiety - is enlarged.
An enlarged amygdala indicates an anxious and depressed child. Children with autism, ADHD or OCD tend to have an enlarged amygdala. So improved conditions later in life doesn’t reverse certain brain regions that developed during a traumatic childhood. Adverse consequences can be reversed to a greater extent than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.
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