Mumbai: Parents, take note! A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have found that chronic, toxic stress like poverty, neglect and physical abuse can have lasting negative impacts on children.
These kinds of stressors, experienced in early life, might be changing the parts of developing children’s brains responsible for learning, memory and the processing of stress and emotion, researchers said.
These changes may be tied to negative impacts on behaviour, health, employment and even the choice of romantic partners later in life, they added.
For the study, researchers recruited 128 children around age 12 who had experienced either physical abuse, neglect early in life or came from low socioeconomic status households. Researchers conducted extensive interviews with the children and their caregivers, documenting behavioural problems and their cumulative life stress. The study was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
