“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” —Childhood Disrupted, pg.228
.
Early-life abuse or chronic neglect left unhindered commonly causes the brain to improperly develop. It can readily be the starting point of a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammatory stress hormones and chemicals, even in otherwise non-stressful daily routines.
It amounts to non-physical-impact brain damage in the form of PTSD. Among other dysfunctions, it has been described as an emotionally tumultuous daily existence, indeed a continuous discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’. For some of us it additionally means being scared of how badly we will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is prescription and/or illicitly medicated.
Therefore, the wellbeing of all children needs to be of genuine importance to everyone — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.
Mindlessly ‘minding our own business’ often proves humanly devastating. Yet, largely owing to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or (the even more self-serving) ‘What’s in it for me as a taxpayer?’
Meanwhile, too many people procreate without being sufficiently knowledgeable of child development science to parent in a psychologically functional/healthy manner. They seem to perceive thus treat human procreative ‘rights’ as though they (potential parents) will somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture their children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
In Childhood Disrupted the author writes that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
As liberal democracies we cannot or will not prevent anyone from bearing children, even those who selfishly recklessly procreate with disastrous outcomes. We can, however, educate young people for this most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless, through mandatory high-school child-development science curriculum. And rather than being about instilling ‘values’, which many parents would understandably oppose, such curriculum should be about understanding child-development, and not just information memorization. There indeed is a difference.
It may even end up mitigating some of the familial dysfunction seemingly increasingly prevalent in society. If nothing else, such curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such important science-based knowledge?
I’ve talked to parents of dysfunctional/unhappy grown children who assert they’d have reared their cerebrally developing kids much more knowledgeably about child development science.
Perhaps with crucial knowledge like: Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby hearing loud noises nearby, such as that of quarrelling parents, can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state. … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123). And it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, rather than the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg. 42).
A sound mental health as well as physical security needs to be EVERY child’s right, especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter — a world in which Child Abuse Prevention Month (every April) clearly needs to run 365 days of the year. And not being abused is definitely a moral right.
.
"I remember leaving the hospital thinking, ‘Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don’t know beans about babies! I don’t have a license to do this. We’re just amateurs’.”
—Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons