HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED by Paul Tough
How Children FailEffect of Poverty
Study took ample resources to address health issues to lessen the disparities between rich and poor. (Providing asthma management, nutrition, vaccinations, etc.) Yet there was not much of a difference. The youth "were still surrounded by violence and chaos...and that was taking a great toll on them, both physically and emotionally." The youth were "depressed or anxious, traumatized...panic attacks to eating disorders to suicidal behavior." (pg. 8-9) ACE Study The study attempted to find a relationship between personal history of "adverse childhood experiences, including physical and sexual abuse, physical and emotional neglect, and various measures of household dysfunction, such as having divorced or separated parents of family members who were incarcerated or mentally ill or addicted." (pg. 9-10) They found a correlation between negative childhood experiences and adult outcomes. Basically, the higher the score the worse outcome as far as addictive behaviors and chronic disease. In fact, someone with an ACE score (a ranking score of 0 to 10 based on the amount of negative experiences) of 4 or higher, an adult has twice the risk of cancer, heart disease and emphysema. Growing up with so many negative experiences leads to low self esteem and worthlessness. You would assume that these feelings could lead to adult destructive behaviors such as excessive drinking, overeating and smoking. But when adults with an ACE score of 7 or more who did not have self destructive habits, there was even a more significant effect on adult health. Overall, they are 360% higher risk for ischemic heart disease that someone with a ACE score of 0, which implied that the effect on your body from childhood stress causes adult health problems. Firehouse Effect The chemical to regulate stress is the HPA. (Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal) When something stressful happens, your body involuntarily goes into defense mode. First your brain releases a chemical that triggers the Pituitary which releases signaling hormones to stimulate the adrenal glands to secrete glucocorticoids. These hormones produce a variety of effects in response to stress including energy into the blood stream, increased heart rate, and delaying non-essential functions so that your body can survive fight or flight. The hormone also helps evaluate the situation, ready to counteract the primary response so that the body can return to normal. Repeatedly sending "all the firetrucks" to put out a fire due to stressful events causes havoc on your body. Examining stress hormones in urine and glucose, insulin and lipids in the blood stream are a higher predictor of medical risk than just looking at blood pressure and heart rate. The stress response system causes allostatic load, wear and tear on the body due to repeated or chronic stress. Executive Function A study showed an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51% of the students were identified with behavioral or learning problems in comparison to 3% with an ACE score of 0. The brain (Prefrontal Cortex) is affected by early stress. The PC is critical in self-regulatory cognitive and emotional activities including managing temper and the ability to calm themselves down. Increased stress made it harder time concentrate, sit still, rebound from disappointment and follow directions which obviously affects your ability to perform in school where these skills are necessary. "When you are overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it's hard to learn." (pg.17) The Stroop test assesses the pre-frontal cortex and it's ability to overcome your immediate instinctive response and the ability to deal with contradictory, confusing and unpredictable situations. The ability to exercise self control (emotional or cognitive) is called executive function. The Simon test (repeating colors and patterns game) was used to test working memory. Working memory is the ability to store a bunch of information in your head at once. Evans and Schamberg found a correlation in compared data of Simon score, poverty history, and allostatic load. The more time in poverty the higher the allostatic load and lower Simon scores, but it wasn't the poverty itself that lowered the executive function, it was the stress that went along with it. Executive function is highly predictive of success, which is encouraging because executive function is easier to influence than cognitive skills. The PC is more responsive to intervention than any other part of the brain. "So if we can improve the child's environment to lead to better executive function, we can increase the prospect of success." (pg. 21) The Adolescent Brain As a younger child, the ability to self-regulate can be a disturbance, but will not alter their entire future, but as adolescents, poor choices (sex, stealing, drinking) can have lifelong consequences. Physiologically adolescents are already out of balance and at risk for bad and impulsive decisions. "The incentive processing system, make you more sensation seeking, more emotionally reactive, more attentive to social information. The cognitive control system allows you to regulate all those urges." (pg.21) Unfortunately, these two systems don't always work together. The incentive system is at full swing in early adolescence while the cognitive control system matures in your twenties. "So for a few wild years, we are all madly processing incentives without a corresponding control system to keep our behavior in check." Combine the typical "whacked out adolescent neurochemistry with an overloaded HPA axis, you've got a particularly toxic brew." (pg.22) There are a few ringleaders that can throw the whole school off kilter. They would "set up the whole school for a whole lot of nonsense." (pg. 22) I Stopped Caring...Anger, Fear and Despair have Taken Over "Researchers gave psychiatric evaluations to more than 10,000 young detainees at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago and found:
Repeated trauma has long term effects:
When does an innocent boy, a victim of his own life, become a chargeable man?" (pgs. 26-27) Good Parenting???
"Parents and other caregivers that are able to form close, nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience in them that protects them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment...The effect of good parenting is not just emotional or psychological, the neuroscientists say; it is biochemical." Meaney's rat experiment showed that rearing mother rats that nurtured their pups with licking a grooming raised rats that were braver, bolder and better adjusted. This nurturing not only affects the level of hormones and brain chemicals, but the actual DNA. The "team was able to establish which part of a pup's genome got switched on by licking and grooming, and it turned out to be the precise segment that controlled the way the rat's hippocampus would process stress hormones in adulthood." In humans, they compared brain tissue at the site on the DNA that are related to the stress response in the hippocampus of human suicides. "They discovered that the suicides who had been maltreated and abused in childhood had experienced methylation effects in the opposite way that the rats had been switched on, they were switched off." (pg. 32) Clancy Blair has been researching 1200 children since infants and tracking their cortisol levels (allostatic load) in response to stress. Family problems did increase cortisol levels but only when the mother was "inattentive or unresponsive. When mothers scored high on measures of responsiveness. the impact of those environmental factors on their children seemed almost to disappear...High quality mothering can act as a powerful buffer against the damage that adversity inflicts on a child's stress-response system." (pg.32) Gary Evans did another study on middle schoolers that looked at allostatic load, environmental factors and maternal responsiveness. Again, it shows that the more severe family turmoil, the higher the allostatic load unless their was a positive maternal score. A mother's sensitivity and nurturing can eliminate the effect of stress on your allostatic load. Good parenting does make a significance difference in a child's future. Attachment Babies whose parents respond fully to cries in the first month were more independent than babies whose parents ignored their cries. Even in pre-school, the parents who responded sensitively to emotional needs as infants were more self-reliant. (pg.33) Ainsworth conducted another experiment called the Strange Situation. Children would play with the mom in a room and she would leave. When she returned, children that warmly greeted their mother, running to her tearfully or with joy were labeled as securely attached. Kids that ignored or lashed out at the mother's return were labeled as anxiously attached. Sroufe and Egeland conducted a long term study of low income/below poverty line Minneapolis first time mothers and their children starting before birth and are now almost 40. 80% were white, 2/3 were unmarried, and half were teens. This is the fullest evaluation of long-lasting effects of early parental relationships on child development. The research showed again at pre-school, middle school and high school that children with attentive parents performed better socially, academically and behaviorally. In fact at age 4, the researchers simply based on maternal caregiving as infants, could determine with 77% accuracy which kids would graduate from high school and which would drop out. Children with more care early on "fostered in them a resilience that acted as a protective buffer against stress." (pg.37) Parenting Interventions Mothers living in poverty, uncertainty and fear have difficulty providing the conditions for secure attachment. It is also significantly more difficult for mothers who were not securely attached as infants. Cicchetti conducted a study of 137 families with one year olds with history of child mistreatment. 90% of the infants were classified with disorganized attachment. Dividing the group into a control and treatment group. The treatment group had a year of intense child-parent psychotherapy. At the end of one year, 61% of the infants were securely attached, while only 2% in the control group receiving the regular community services provided to families reported for maltreatment. There are also great improvements in the stress response system. Another treatment program called Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care is a less intensive 6 month program. But results also showed improved attachment and cortisol patterns were moved to the normal range. ABC, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up, teaches foster parents to respond calmly and attentively to infants. Even though the parents are the only ones receiving treatment, the HPA-axis of the children is improved. Many are convinced that improving attachment is the most powerful at improving child outcomes. Building inner strength and resilience, builds a better parent and better child. Many intervention programs for at risk families focuses on physical health, speech or vocabulary. Fisher, Dozier, Cicchetti and Lieberman's research found that attachment has a greater potential to child improvement over any other type of intervention. Keitha's Story: "Keitha Jones was a 17 year old Fenger High School senior. She had a hard look about her, tattoos, piercings, red dye in a choppy haircut. She lived in her mother's house, a small worn bungalow, loud and crowded, full of conflict, always populated by a rotating crew of lodgers: siblings, half siblings, uncles, cousins. On rare occasions, the cast would include Keitha's father, who was, as she described him, a "player," a local mechanic with a wife and family living a few blocks away girlfriends (including Keitha's mom) scattered all over the neighborhood, and a total of 19 kids. Growing up, Keitha would accasionally meet a girl who looked suspiciously like herself, and she' think: Well, there's another sister. Keitha's mother had been a Fenger student back in the 80's until she got kicked out in her senior year for showing up at school drunk. Now she was addicted to crack, Keitha told me, as were many others in her extended family. Some of them dealt cocaine as well and when Keitha was young, police raided the house looking for drugs or guns, knocked over dressers and threw pots and pans around and then usually dragged one relative or another away in handcuffs. When Keitha was in the sixth grade, she was sexually molested by a relative, an older man she called Cousin Angelo, also a crack addict, who lived with her family throughout their childhood. "I was real young, and I was scared," she recalled. "So I was just, like, whatever you're going to do, you need to do it and get it over with." The abuse, which went on for years, ate away at her. SHe hoped her mother would somehow notice and intervene, but Keitha never actually said anything - she was afraid that if she did tell her mother, her mother wouldn't believe her, and that would be more than Keitha could bear. So she kept quiet and just got angrier and angrier. She and her mother argued all the time, but they never came to blows; Keitha believed it was wrong to strike an adult. "So that's why I used to come to school, just to fight," she told me. "That was the was for me to relieve the stress. I didn't talk to people about my problems, I just let them build up inside until I was ready to explode. And so when I got to school, as soon as someone said something to me that I didn't like, I'd take my anger out on them, because I knew I couldn't hit my mama." In her Freshman year at Fenger, Keitha piles up multiple disciplinary infractions, one ten-day suspension after another, until she had a reputation as one of the most violent kids at a violent school. "That's how everybody thought of me. As a fighter. I used to brag on it." In June of 2010, Keitha was assigned a YAP advocate as a mentor. The 31 year old woman ran her own beauty salon and Reed put Keitha to work as a shampoo girl, cleaning up and occasionally helping out with molding, braiding or tight dreads. Reed valued the importance of a young lady's physical appearance so she worked with Keitha on her hair, nails and clothes. The spent hours working together at the salon, out in the neighborhood, eating, sitting and talking in an extended salon therapy session. Reed was like a big sister to Keitha and together they organized dinners for other girls enrolled in the YAP program where they could trade stories about neglectful parents, boys, drugs and anger. Keitha who never opened up to anyone about anything, opened up. "My whole outlook on life changed." At Reed's suggestion, Keitha started praying. "I asked God to just heal me," she said, "to forgive all the bad thinks I did." She stopped arguing with her mother and quit fighting at school. When a couple of sophomore girls stared mouthing off to her in the hallways, she kept her cool and asked Reed what to do about it. Reed helped to arrange a sit-sown with the girls in the office, and much to Keitha's surprise, they were able to work through their problems. "When we sat down to talk about it, it turned out it was all over nothing." That fall, Keitha's younger sister, who was just 6, told Keitha that Cousin Angelo had tried to touch her. "When she said that, I just couldn't stop crying. I felt so guilty. Because if I had said something when I was younger, then maybe he would have been gone, and it wouldn't ever have happened to my sister." By law, Reed is obligated to report this to DCFS (Department of Child and Family Services.) In Roseland, they were the bad guys; they were the people who took your kids away. In the end Angelo was removed, in jail charged with sexual assault on a minor. Keitha and her siblings stayed with their mother. As Keitha had feared, her mother wan't very supportive about Keitha's decision to speak out about Angelo. She complained about losing the three hundred dollars a month that Angelo had been contributing to the rent, and she sometimes seemed to Keitha to be more concerned about how Angelo would survive in prison than about the daughters he molested. But Keitha had resolved to change her life, and the incident with Angelo made her more determined. "I'm not going to let my past affect my future. I'm going to think about it every now and then, but I'm not going to let it take a toll. The worst has already been done, I'm looking for the positive now. I'm tired of living the way I'm living that I'm going to do everything in my power to change things." How to Build CharacterCharacter are skills that you can teach the focus on personal growth and achievement.
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Brain responding to StressThe largest gap between impulse and thinking is the teen years.When does the victim become the chargeable man?High Quality Parenting can Buffer StressDisorganized attachement is especially associated with external problems such as acting out and being bad.
Intervention Strategies for Issues that might not go away due to attachment so they don't develop into disorganized attachment.1. Develop nurturance
2. Let your child take the lead - don't take charge and take over 3. Recognize things that may be intrusive (ex. they might not like tickling) notice the child's reactions 4. Why might this be the child's reaction? History? 5. Realize they have other choices.
Parents need to overcome their own tendencies
Though she was behind on her credits at school, Keitha set her mind on graduating with her class in the summer of 2011, and the school system made it possible for her, by doing make-up work, night school, online credit-recovery. For the first time in her academic career, she actually worked hard at her classes; she attended night school five days a week and often stayed at Fenger from eight in the morning till seven at night. She graduated in June and enrolled in a community college where she began studying for a cosmetology degree. Keitha talked of the future, "Five years from now, I picture myself in my own apartment with my own money. And my little sisters can come live with me."
That was what always impressed me the most about Keitha; that her dream was to find a way out not just for herself but for her family too. "I want to show my little sisters that there is a better life than what we see every day. It might look to them like this is all you get, because they don't know nothing but living here. But there's more in life than what it is out here, all this fighting and killing and all that. There's more, way more." Interventions early on are most beneficial, but they can make a difference later on too. Interventions that focus on emotional and psychological, much more so than cognitive interventions. Executive function and the ability to handle stress and manage strong emotions can be improved in adolescence and even into adulthood. Teenagers have to ability and potential to rethink and remake their lives in a way younger children do not. This can be a turning point, a transformation, turning from near certain failure and begin a course towards success."(pgs. 43-48) |