“Be kind to me, Lord,” reads the epigram for the National Children’s Defense Fund, “My boat is so small and the sea is so wide.” A child’s personality and his neurology—the little boat he must navigate in—are still developing. Relatively mild childhood injury can have long-lasting effects because it occurs while the very structures of the personality, body, and brain are being formed—or malformed. A growing body of evidence indicates that a heightened state of arousal—the body’s inherent “fight or flight” reaction to stress—in small children may have permanent physiological consequences.
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