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If the mother or carer so much as goes out of sight, there is a possibility that the child could be at...
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Toddlers who are defined as having these disorganised attachments are those who don’t have a consistent pattern of behaviour with their mother.
It seems likely then that trauma has its strongest effects on the stress response while the stress response is developing – up to the age of 3.
But in families which neglect or criticise their children too much, there can be a fundamental uncertainty about the worth of the self.
Fear is usually a component of the ‘disorganised’ baby’s experience, perhaps partly because inconsistent care in the first year of life is itself potentially life threatening.
Small stresses may escalate into major distress because the orbitofrontal cortex cannot control the arousal of the amygdala and hypothalamus.
Even though time passes and he looks as if he is growing up, internally he may remain a baby who awaits vital input that would give him the tools to cope with the world.
The kind of neglect that results from having parents preoccupied with their own emotional states can also be very frightening. It is hard to make sense of a world which has to be navigated without a reliable guide.
But it does not teach the child how to manage his feelings.
The requirement not to have feelings that your parent finds too demanding may also result in the production of a ‘false self’, a front which acts like a person but doesn’t feel like a person inside.
During toddlerhood, important aspects of socialisation are taking place, facilitating important brain development.
this is when the orbitofrontal area of the prefrontal cortex matures and comes online.
As the orbitofrontal cortex starts to develop connections with the amygdala, it can stop the amygdala in turn from activating the hypot...
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This enables the child to begin to be able to control his own behaviour in response to parental guidance and to ch...
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This is a key period when parents can start to convey their r...
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they need to restore the warm connection with their parent in order to disperse the cortisol and other stress hormones and regulate back to a normal set point.
Severely borderline people often have great difficulty thinking about their experiences, particularly their experiences with their parents.
‘I can’t keep good experiences in.’ Good feelings run through the fingers like sand, perhaps because nothing good can be trusted in a world where parents have been so ambivalent towards you.
But if the parental response is consistently negative or absent, we can feel ‘wiped out’, invalidated and basically bad.
behaviour patterns are changeable during the first year
At least some of these differences at birth have a great deal to do with the environmental influences that have already been at work for 9 months, during the period of gestation.
Recent research with monkeys has found that when they were deprived of their mothers early on, their serotonin decreased by up to 23 per cent in areas of the brain such as the amygdala and hypothalamus (involved in the stress response) as well as the anterior cingulate, caudate and thalamus (Ichise et al. 2006).
They were also more likely to be impulsive and aggressive later in life.
Similarly, nicotine affects the normal development of neurotransmitter systems and interferes with communication between nerve cells (Slotkin 1998). It can also lead to a loss of brain cells and in particular can have an effect on the thickness of the orbitofrontal cortex
Second, when serotonin is low, it can’t manage the dopamine system effectively or hold back excessive dopamine activation.
Recent research suggests that fathers may play an important role in establishing good emotional regulation early on.
when fathers were distant and uninvolved, their babies had more externalising problems at the age of 1 year old
Hostile, coercive and harsh parenting is strongly linked to the child’s difficulty in regulating emotions and increases the likelihood that a child will react and act out his or her anger
The maltreated child ends up not only being more watchful and vigilant, but also has a more active right brain (processing negative feelings), and a much higher heart rate when provoked by his schoolmates
He tends to anticipate hostility from others, often interpreting others’ behaviour as aggressive and antagonistic even when it isn’t
Pinker points out that we have a limited ‘circle of sympathy’ for others, and that morality depends on how far we extend our ‘circle of sympathy
but most wars, conflicts and crimes involve this denial of the other’s humanity.
The three main strategies are self-distraction, comfort seeking and seeking information about the obstacle to our goals. One study found that 3 year olds who were skilled in using all three strategies showed the least aggressive and externalising behaviour
These strategies are learnt – they are modelled by parental behaviour and encouragement, they are not genetic.
Parents who succeed in tuning in to their baby’s moods and give him lots of feedback are helping to consolidate his self-awareness, which in time will be reflected in a well-connected, ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Since this part of the brain helps him to quell fears and anxieties, it also plays an important role in self-regulation
This is achieved by offering mildly stressful but manageable challenges followed by helping the baby restore his good feelings about himself.
experiences of maltreatment can reduce brain volume in these regulatory areas
This makes it much more difficult for the child to know how to regulate feelings, or to feel confident in turning to others for help in challenging situations.
Instead, the introverted maltreated child learns to hide her feelings and may try desperately to please others to get her needs met, while the ‘externaliser’ tries to get his feelings noticed by making an impact on others, or ...
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One curious feature is the gender difference in choice of strategy: women tend to take the depressive route, while men tend to take the aggressiv...
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It is possible to predict future problems as early as the age of 6 to 10 months, but not from the baby’s temperament so much as from the parent’s behaviour coupled with the baby’s temperament.
But poor regulation at this stage already predicts future externalising behaviour
Repeated experiences of violence, or witnessing violence can desensitise the child, leading to the assumption that it is normal. In this sense, the children of those who use violence do ‘learn’ to use it themselves.
Problems that exist by the age of 2 tend to be stable and to persist.
If children have not learnt self-control by the age of 3, their behaviour tends to be consistently problematic through childhood and they are more likely to demonstrate later conduct disorder
In many cases, their own dependency needs have never been fully met, so they are not fully able to take on the adult role of parenting. They are still looking to others to take care of them.
For example, the early stress may have affected his capacity to retain information. Although he loved reading, he could not remember what he read
It is common for the hippocampus in the brain to be affected by chronic stress, affecting the laying down of memories.
when parents hit their children and treat them with overt hostility, as in Billy Connolly’s case, they are powerfully conveying the message that they are worthless and bad,
