This week’s cover story is about how childhood stress and trauma connect to serious health issues in adulthood, like addiction and even cancer. But it’s not hopeless, as a program addressing adverse childhood experiences here in Humboldt shows — even amid the added stresses of a pandemic. Speaking of which, we’re also talking about the limits of cooking and comfort food to get us through. What do we do when the coping mechanisms we rely on lose their effectiveness? Mostly we keep cooking. Hit subscribe and join the weekly conversation about Humboldt County stories.
This article appears in Reaching for Resilience.
“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood. (Childhood Disrupted, pg.228).
Unhindered abuse and exploitation typically launches a helpless child towards an adolescence and adulthood in which his/her brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-inducing stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines.
Yet society generally treats human procreative rights as though well somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our childrens naturally developing minds and needs.
I strongly believe that a psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all childrens foremost rightespecially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enterand therefore basic child development science and rearing should be learned long before the average person has their first child.
By not teaching this to high school students, is it not as though societally were implying that anyone can comfortably enough go forth with unconditionally bearing children with whatever minute amount, if any at all, of such vital knowledge they happen to have acquired over time? Perhaps foremost to consider is that during their first three to six years of life (depending on which expert one asks) children have particularly malleable minds (like a dry sponge squeezed and released under water), thus theyre exceptionally vulnerable to whatever rearing environment in which they happened to have been placed by fate.
I frequently wonder how many instances there are wherein immense long-term suffering by children of dysfunctional rearing might have been prevented had the parent(s) received some crucial parenting instruction by way of mandatory high school curriculum.
(Frank Sterle Jr.)