Childhood Trauma Essay

497 Words2 Pages

Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that repeated stress of abuse, neglect and having parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This happens across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease as well as lung cancer. There has been an impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on. I feel that Dr. Harris used control groups to form her research due to 17,500 adults were asked about their history of exposure to what they called "adverse childhood experiences," or ACEs. Those did include physical, emotional, sexual abuse; physical …show more content…

I say this because Dr. Burke-Harris was very interested in how different factors contributed to child hood trauma and in that, how this affected them as they grew into older adults. She has devoted a lot of her research from childhood to adolescence, adulthood and old age. Dr. Burke-Harris upon her research came to the conclusion that childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. She explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the …show more content…

Burke-Harris would be a behavior that is determined by multiple causes. “Behavior is exceedingly complex, and most aspects of behavior are determined by multiple causes”, (20) as explained in the book. In doing her research she looked at different traumas that children faced, not just one. She wanted to see how several different things played a role in how a child’s brain developed over the years. There were not twenty adults asked about their childhood traumas, there were 17,500 adults asked. In doing that, there was a well-rounded amount of research that was gathered to make better sense of the whole experiment. This was an excellent experiment that was done. We never know why we do the things we do; a lot of times of more often than none, it started from our