Post by corkwing on Oct 29, 2014 15:56:07 GMT
Many adopted children come from a background of abuse and neglect. The family history also shows a number of generations of dysfunction. So I was wondering, "what factors are affecting our kids?"
Firstly, there’s the genetic. There may be a genetic component in there that has caused or added to the birth family’s history of dysfunction. It may have caused or contributed to or been a factor in mental health issues, for example. Autistic spectrum disorders, for example, are quoted as having a genetic component in as many as 90% of cases (although that, as with all other proposed factors in autism, has not been proved and is not universally accepted).
Then there’s the epigenetic. What’s that? That’s where certain genes get switched on or off dependent on environment. Have a look at www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-spector/epigenetics_b_3604759.html. Dysfunction, it appears, breeds dysfunction epigenetically.
You then have the prenatal environment. Drugs and alcohol consumed by the mother will damage their unborn children, although the effect seems to depend upon the degree and the timing. If it’s extreme, then you get the devastating effects of foetal alcohol syndrome and similar, but lesser amounts or at less dangerous times have their effects. Prenatal stress has also been shown to have permanent effects on children, particularly on their own stress levels. So if the mother was in an abusive relationship or knew there was a threat of losing her baby, she could well have been stressed. That is likely to have affected the child, and if she self-medicated with drink and drugs then that could well have made things even worse.
After birth the effects of neglect are wide ranging. Brain and physical development are affected by the stimulus that we receive. If we don’t get the “correct” stimulus then our brain and body don’t develop appropriately. This can affect just about everything, physical, cognitive and emotional. That’s one of the reasons why adopted kids can have problems with speech and language, co-ordination, sensory input, cause and effect thinking, executive functioning and a whole host of other issues. It will also affect the hormonal system and their response to it. For instance, if you’re cuddled, you get all sorts of chemicals released into your bloodstream and you learn that it feels great. If you don’t get cuddled then you don’t learn how good it is and can find the rise in feel-good chemicals to be weird or scary, in much the same way that most people feel uncomfortable about a rise in their stress hormones.
Neglect will also mean that the child doesn’t develop a secure attachment, which can exacerbate and amplify other symptoms, especially stress, and also make it harder for them to accept help. Help often requires you to trust the therapist or parents. If you mistrust them are you going to find it easy to take their advice or do the exercises that they set you?
A chaotic family will mean high stress levels. If a young child is subjected to repeated or persistent high stress levels early on then their stress system loses its ability to regulate itself: it’s as if the stress hormone tap gets stuck on. So if they missed that in utero, there’s a fair chance that they’ll get clobbered by it in their early life.
If there’s abuse, then there’s also the possibility of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that will also have magnified other symptoms. But, as I understand it, neglect is actually more harmful than abuse, and the most harmful is when the neglect is unpredictable. If the parenting is consistently poor then you kind of learn to live with it. If it swings between poor and good enough and back again then the unpredictability is even more damaging.
Chaos and abuse can also lead to hypervigilance. Although it’s great for when you lose your car keys, it does mean that the kid is going to be using large parts of their brain in monitoring their situation rather than listening to the teacher droning on about abstract concepts like letters and numbers.
And just to cap it all, at about a year old the child’s brain organises itself to cope with the environment in which it finds itself. So if they’ve been brought up in a chaotic environment, their brain will now hard-wire itself for living like that. No wonder they struggle when placed in calm, peaceful families!
Firstly, there’s the genetic. There may be a genetic component in there that has caused or added to the birth family’s history of dysfunction. It may have caused or contributed to or been a factor in mental health issues, for example. Autistic spectrum disorders, for example, are quoted as having a genetic component in as many as 90% of cases (although that, as with all other proposed factors in autism, has not been proved and is not universally accepted).
Then there’s the epigenetic. What’s that? That’s where certain genes get switched on or off dependent on environment. Have a look at www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-spector/epigenetics_b_3604759.html. Dysfunction, it appears, breeds dysfunction epigenetically.
You then have the prenatal environment. Drugs and alcohol consumed by the mother will damage their unborn children, although the effect seems to depend upon the degree and the timing. If it’s extreme, then you get the devastating effects of foetal alcohol syndrome and similar, but lesser amounts or at less dangerous times have their effects. Prenatal stress has also been shown to have permanent effects on children, particularly on their own stress levels. So if the mother was in an abusive relationship or knew there was a threat of losing her baby, she could well have been stressed. That is likely to have affected the child, and if she self-medicated with drink and drugs then that could well have made things even worse.
After birth the effects of neglect are wide ranging. Brain and physical development are affected by the stimulus that we receive. If we don’t get the “correct” stimulus then our brain and body don’t develop appropriately. This can affect just about everything, physical, cognitive and emotional. That’s one of the reasons why adopted kids can have problems with speech and language, co-ordination, sensory input, cause and effect thinking, executive functioning and a whole host of other issues. It will also affect the hormonal system and their response to it. For instance, if you’re cuddled, you get all sorts of chemicals released into your bloodstream and you learn that it feels great. If you don’t get cuddled then you don’t learn how good it is and can find the rise in feel-good chemicals to be weird or scary, in much the same way that most people feel uncomfortable about a rise in their stress hormones.
Neglect will also mean that the child doesn’t develop a secure attachment, which can exacerbate and amplify other symptoms, especially stress, and also make it harder for them to accept help. Help often requires you to trust the therapist or parents. If you mistrust them are you going to find it easy to take their advice or do the exercises that they set you?
A chaotic family will mean high stress levels. If a young child is subjected to repeated or persistent high stress levels early on then their stress system loses its ability to regulate itself: it’s as if the stress hormone tap gets stuck on. So if they missed that in utero, there’s a fair chance that they’ll get clobbered by it in their early life.
If there’s abuse, then there’s also the possibility of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that will also have magnified other symptoms. But, as I understand it, neglect is actually more harmful than abuse, and the most harmful is when the neglect is unpredictable. If the parenting is consistently poor then you kind of learn to live with it. If it swings between poor and good enough and back again then the unpredictability is even more damaging.
Chaos and abuse can also lead to hypervigilance. Although it’s great for when you lose your car keys, it does mean that the kid is going to be using large parts of their brain in monitoring their situation rather than listening to the teacher droning on about abstract concepts like letters and numbers.
And just to cap it all, at about a year old the child’s brain organises itself to cope with the environment in which it finds itself. So if they’ve been brought up in a chaotic environment, their brain will now hard-wire itself for living like that. No wonder they struggle when placed in calm, peaceful families!
