What happens to us as kids shapes who we are as adults. That’s not a newsflash, but more and more, we’re hearing about the health effects of our childhoods. From epigenetic influences to the trauma we carry in our bodies and minds, what happens to us as kids–and what happens to OUR KIDS as kids–matters.
The medical profession and mental health experts are now paying attention to something called adverse childhood experiences (or ACEs for short). Every one of us has an ACE score, which is based on a decades-long study begun in the 80’s. You can answer a series of 10 (simple but often triggering) questions that will give you a score (depending on your number of “yeses”) from 1-10. From the original study, a big public health data set was analyzed, and it showed patterns that proved there’s a strong correlation between what happens in childhood and adult health decades later.
In fact, the CDC says ACEs are the prime determinate of health.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, ACEs are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today.
ACEs are long-term, prolonged, negative experiences that tend to cause toxic stress. STRESS isn’t necessarily BAD. We all need it for our fight-or-flight response and protection. Some of it is natural. But PROLONGED negative stress is no good. Especially as a kid when your brain is still developing. In the areas of decision making, self control…..your brain may not wire correctly. (think future addictive behaviors, substance abuse)
All adults are former children & most children are future adults. So a health crisis that starts in childhood is huge. It affects all of us in some way.
How do we do better for ourselves & the kids in our lives (especially the ones who are going through something hard)?
We take our childhoods with us.
Instead of asking “what’s wrong with you?” to random people or our own children (or our own SELVES), we need to learn to ask “what happened to you?
The CDC sorts ACEs into 3 categories:
- Abuse (emotional, physical, sexual),
- household challenges (witness to violence, substance abuse, mental illness, criminal behavior, separation/divorce),
- neglect (emotional or physical)
Within these categories, ACEs can include things like:
- Parental illness; mental or physical (unspoken). Parental loss (unspoken)
- Divorce/blended family issues (different parenting approaches; stepparent (having to move, change schools, upheaval)
- Abusive/violent environment at home
- Addiction
- Poverty, not enough to eat, no clean clothes
- Feeling neglected, un-consulted, isolated, unheard, minimized, unvalued
- Sworn at, yelled at, struck, felt unsafe
FEELING (child’s perception) is as important as the experience itself.
ACEs happen in every demographic, geographical region, and every race/ethnic group. It’s not just a “poor kids in the inner city” kind of thing. Most people you know have experienced one of them. You think “not my kid, no way” but …. Maybe. And if not your kid, then some kid who KNOWS your kid.
Average score is 2.
67% have at least one category. Almost 13% have FOUR OR MORE.
TOXIC STRESS
Toxic stress changes the way our bodies cope. Alters our stress-response systems and brain architecture and interrupts learning. People with 4 or more ACEs were 32 times more likely to be diagnosed with learning and behavioral problems.
Toxic stress makes chemical marks on our DNA, changing the way our genetics are expressed!
BIOLOGICAL REPERCUSSIONS OF CHRONIC STRESS
Recent research suggests chronic stress damage starts before we’re even conceived and cuts into our very cells. A number of studies have linked stress with shorter telomeres, a chromosome component that’s been associated with cellular aging and risk for heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
How do personality and environment play into this phenomenon? Elissa Epel, PhD, has been exploring that question for more than a decade at the University of California, San Francisco, where she directs the Center for Aging, Metabolism and Emotion. She often works with Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, who won a Nobel Prize in 2009 for her research on telomeres.
What are telomeres and how are they related to aging and disease?
Telomeres are a protective casing at the end of a strand of DNA. Each time a cell divides, it loses a bit of its telomeres. An enzyme called telomerase can replenish it, but chronic stress and cortisol exposure decrease your supply. When the telomere is too diminished, the cell often dies or becomes pro-inflammatory. This sets the aging process in motion, along with associated health risks.
How does stress rank in terms of factors that affect telomere length?
The two biggest factors are chronological aging and genetics, but stress is now on the map as one of the most consistent predictors of shorter telomere length. The type of stress determines how big its effect is. It seems exposures to multiple early life adversities, such as child neglect, have the largest effects, since they track through to late adulthood, or they set in place persistent mechanisms that maintain short telomeres throughout life, such as exaggerated stress reactivity and poor health behaviors. Stressors such as caregiving in late life also have an effect. So we can see this relationship between stress and cell aging across a lifespan, and it’s fundamental to how we’re built. Our brains are constantly looking for threats to our survival. When we expose our bodies to years of chronic stress arousal, we see effects that override normal aging, making our telomeres look like they are from a significantly older person. When we look at groups of people with psychiatric disorders related to dysregulated emotional responses, especially depression, and compare them to controls who have never experienced these disorders, they consistently have shorter telomeres.
FROM HARVARD UNIVERSITY SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEBSITE
Researchers have discovered that the genes of mice exposed to chronic stress change over time. Modifications were most associated with genes related to a variety of mental illnesses, such as depression, autism spectrum disorder, and schizophrenia.1-3
How exactly are genetics, stress, and mental illness related? DNA, serves as instructions for cells and is broken up into functional units called genes. The interplay between DNA and the environment is what makes each person unique.
ACEs associated with chronic health conditions in children & adults. Statistically, higher scores correlate with drug use, alcoholism, suicide, incarceration, risky sexual behavior….higher the score, the more the risk. If you score 1, you’re twice as likely to suffer alcoholism as a person with 0. If you have have 5, you’re 5x more likely.
You’re increasing the odds—-higher LIKELIHOOD, not a LIFE DETERMINATION. Increase is also not linear; some risks increase faster than others.
Same trends apply to not only BEHAVIORS but HEALTH CONDITIONS/CHRONIC DISEASES: cancer, hepatitis, heart disease, headaches, 16 difft autoimmune diseases, diabetes, etc….. (compromises immune system!)
Beyond that, life expectancy. With a 1-2…LE = 80. If you’re 7, your LE is 60 yrs.
***All this data can show us how to help. How to help earlier. How to show up for each other & ask the right questions.
What do you do with your score? Are you doomed????
No one is their worst moment, their sad childhood. There’s more to all of us than that. We also have POSITIVE experiences that can salve our risks.
PROTECTIVE FACTORS
- Individual
Personal traits & skills—adaptability, temperament, calm, humor… what may naturally be part of who you are. Core life skills—things that increase self-worth/confidence. Are you worth paying attention to? (response to baby’s smile, eye contact instead of looking at your phone). Support thru failing….(at walking, building tower, riding bike, etc.). Maybe creative expression thru art/music/writing. Being a part of something bigger than yourself (culture, religion). Organization, emotional control,
self-control….(FREE PLAY OUTSIDE without an agenda, how to solve problems). NATURE improves resilience.
2. Relationships
- With peers (supportive friends), siblings
- Church, neighborhood, school (coaches, teachers)
- *At least one supportive adult in their life (family, foster situation, neighbor, babysitter..)
- Therapy/counseling: Learning how to cope with anxiety, depression, panic, etc. that you might assume would come from ACEs., behaviors (repeating bad relationships you were modeled, etc.).
IF you identify your ACEs, also look for PROTECTIVE FACTORS: adults, confidence, self worth, coping skills, processing thru communication, etc.
ALL of these protective factors don’t exist for all of us. Don’t feel bad if you don’t or didn’t have them all. It’s just an awareness — like be aware of what factors might help & seek them out. Just try.
Given enough support from adults in their lives, lots of protective factors , a belief in their own competence, and plenty of hope (reasons to believe life will get better)… we can overcome. Kids who believe their future will be better than their present do better across the board.
There’s not a FORMULA of ACE minus PROTECTIVE FACTOR = Given Outcome
‘Cause we’re people & we’re complicated.
HAVE TO SHOW KIDS HOW TO HOPE.
Hope increases academic performance, graduation rates, career success…Hope predicted test scores and term GPA when controlling for previous grades, intelligence, etc. In Addiction Inoculation (by Jessica Lahey), she says “the greatest challenge of teaching in my rehab classroom was the palpable lack of hope. It stole my student’s joy and rendered so many of my tips for boosting performance worthless.” For most, it’s not absent—just buried beneath bad decisions, low expectations, and self-defeating behavior.
NEW MORNING MERCIES, by Paul David Tripp,
As God’s child, you don’t sit and wait for hope. No, grace makes it possible for you to get up and live in hope.
Gospel hope is a mouthful. It includes so many wonderful provisions that it’s hard to get it all in one bite. Yes, biblical hope gives you a lot of spiritual nutrients to chew on. Yet many believers seem to live hope-deprived lives. Perhaps one of the dirty secrets of the church is how much we do out of fear and not faith. We permit ourselves to feel small, unable, alone, unprepared, and bereft of resources. We tell ourselves that what we’re facing is too big and requires too much of us. We stand at the bottom of mountains of trouble and give up before we’ve taken the first step of the climb. We wait for hope to come in some noticeable, seeable way, but it never seems to arrive. We pray, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. We want to believe that God is there and that he really does care, but it seems that we’ve been left to ourselves. With each passing day, it
seems harder to have hope for our marriages, for our children, for our churches, for our friendships, or just for the ability to survive all the trouble with our faith and sanity intact. We wonder, “Where is hope to be found?”
What we fail to understand is that we don’t have a hope problem; we have a sight problem. Hope has come. “What?” you say. “Where?” Hope isn’t a thing. Hope isn’t a set of circumstances. Hope isn’t first a set of ideas. Hope is a person, and his name is Jesus. He came to earth to face what you face and to defeat what defeats you so that you would have hope. Your salvation means that you are now in a personal relationship with the One who is hope. You have hope because he exists and is your Savior. You don’t have a hope problem; you have been given hope that is both real and constant. The issue is whether you see it. Paul captures the problem this way in Ephesians 1: 18–19: “. . . having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might.”
Paul prays that we will have a well-working spiritual vision system so that we will “see” the hope that we have been given in Christ. What is this hope? It is a rich inheritance. Jesus died and left us a rich inheritance of grace to be invested in facing the troubles of the here and now. It is great power that is ours in the moments when we are so weak. Hope came, and he brought with him riches and power that he gave to you. You see, you don’t really have a hope problem; you have a vision problem, and for that there’s enlightening grace.