Essay on Brain Development in Victims of Child Abuse

The purpose of this paper is to conduct library research on early childhood trauma and its effects on brain development. This paper will discuss the consequences of early childhood trauma, specifically the manner in which it impacts brain development. Included will be a discussion of What tends to happen to people who experience early childhood trauma. Within the paper will be a description of the consequences of this type of trauma for the urban individual, family, community, or culture. This paper will then identify two of the most effective, evidenced based practice treatment models utilized for survivors of this form of trauma.

Often times we are unaware of events that go on behind closed doors. Abuse (mental, physical, and sexual) can alter a child’s behavior, personality, and trust. Often times these children will be unwilling to participate in any activity or lesson. Not only do these traumatic events affect the child now, but it can leave lasting cognitive and behavioral problems. A child who has been abused “can be detected only through the emotional and behavioral abnormalities that it causes (G. Jacobi, 2010).”

Abuse is an experience that sticks with children forever; with high emotions and fears clogging their mind they have no room to think about other important factors such as schoolwork. Brain development is especially important in the younger years, and when a child is abused this interrupts the development for this student. This brain development trauma leads into the classroom in different areas of a child’s life such as cognitive functioning, interpersonal skills with others, and their overall academic performance (Finkelhor, 2008). One cannot simply expect a child who was an abused to not have any form of cognitive problems.

This kind of trauma is related in events which include physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, and medical trauma. The effects of children that experience complex trauma usually have PTSD, insecure attachment and developmental disruptions. Research has indicated that trauma exposure can result in structural and functional changes in the brain. Neurobiological findings following trauma exposure include neuroendocrine dysregulation; reduction in the hippocampal, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex volume; and decrease in corpus callosum size (Kliethermes, Schacht, & Drewry, 2014). The brain cortex holds the responsibilities for the functions of memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thinking, language, and

The topic of child maltreatment is a serious subject, and is important because maltreatment can hinder cognitive, biological, and social development. This topic has a large impact on caregivers of maltreated children. This information is relevant because it can help individuals in understand and interact with those who were maltreated in childhood. For example, maltreated children have lower rates of prosocial behavior, and exhibit withdrawn and aggressive/disruptive behavior (Alink, Cicchetti, Kim, & Rogosch, 2012). By knowing this information, caregivers can find more effective ways of communicating and interacting with maltreated children. Additionally, maltreatment occurs more frequently than we think. In a nationwide survey of young adult,

Anda, R.F., Felitti, V.J., Bremner, J.D., Walker, J.D., Whitfield, C., Perry, B.D., Dube, S.R. & Giles, W.H. (2006). The enduring effects of abuse and related adverse experiences in childhood: A convergence of evidence from neurobiology and epidemiology. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. 256: 174-186.

Discipline starts at home. How parents discipline their children affects how they evolve in life. When children leaves their home and enter school children learn rules in a classroom to respect their teachers and their classmates. Children are not always supervised by an adult. There may be an adult watching over them but they cannot keep an eye on everything. Physical abuse is easier to determine than verbal abuse. Parents are the prior source for children to learn that physical, verbal or any form of abuse is wrong, but what happens when parents are abusing their children? Benj Vardigan reports that “verbal abuse can undermine your child’s self-esteem, damage his ability to trust and form relationships, and chip away at academic and social skills” (Vardigan). Parents need to find ways to discipline their children without being abusive because how they are treated does affect their development.

As a growing problem in America as well as around the world, child abuse poses a threat to the success of its victims in their adult life. Four million children around the world are victims of child abuse each year, the majority being within the first 5 years of their lives (Ark of Hope 01). Due to the amount of development that the brain undergoes during those years, the psychological damage can affect the individual’s mental health for several years after, impairing success in an individual’s adult life. However, contrary to previous belief, new research proves that these repercussions can be reversed through the right treatment.

“Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime.”-Herbert Ward. With long hours of research over this topic, I understand what child abuse is about and how they could change mentally. When people see a child that is very mischievous, they may think that the child is just a bad kid, but what they do not realize is they may have a terrible household environment; the child is probably abused at home and needs something that they can’t get at home. It is sad that people could do such a horrible thing to an innocent child and for them not to be able to feel safe in their own home, let alone their own family. Sometimes we forget about that child abuse happens every single day. Just because you do not see it, does not mean it does not happen.

Early child abuse poses threats on a child’s intellectual growth and the potential of developing psychiatric disorders such as eating disorders later on within adolescent stages. Eating disorders affect up to 24 million Americans and 70 million people worldwide. 1 in 5 women struggle with an eating disorder or disordered eating. It is estimated that 90% of those who have eating disorders are women between the ages of 12 and 25.

Child abuse and trauma can affect a person’s mental health and can cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other severe mental disorders. Mental health practitioners should practice psychotherapy, and help clients set goals when in therapy sessions and work together with doctors to use medication because the combination of therapy and medication are proven to be more effective than either alone.

When pertaining to the central nervous system (CNS), chronic stress can greatly deteriorate its function in a number of ways. Brehm (2014) states, “Chronic stress exerts negative effects with both cognitive function (especially memory) and mood disorders, including anxiety and depression” (p. 196).

After birth, stress continues to affect infants and young children in comparable ways when they exposed to stress. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis (the body 's regulatory system that integrates the nervous system with the endocrine system and controls reactions to stress) matures significantly during the early childhood. Exposure to stress early in life has programming effects on the brain (hippocampus, frontal cortex, and amygdala) and chronic stress changes HPA functioning by altering the neurological circuitry, in part through its effects on the limbic and cortical processes (Ulrich-Lai & Herman. 2009). The behaviors correlated with disrupted HPA activity include heightened vigilance and

The threatening and stressful nature of maltreatment during childhood alters the physiological makeup in the brain, particularly the neural mechanisms related to memory processing and storage (Cicchetti, Rogosch, Howe, & Toth, 2010). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2016) define child maltreatment as an act or series of acts by a primary caregiver that results in harm to a child, and it

Memory is the blueprint of an individual’s growth and development. Experiences that are repeated are often taken for granted, such as learning to walk and learning to speak and write to express oneself, become encoded to ensure a smooth flow of information that help us adapt to the environment (confusing sentence). However, children’s exposure to environmental stressors, depending on the exposure frequency and intensity, may impair the normal development of memory in children. This paper will evaluate the role of child maltreatment in the changes of children’s memory function. In addition to exploring the effects of maltreatment on the physiology of the primary brain structures that are involved in the functions of memory, the paper will also