Severe childhood trauma can leave a huge impact on individuals, well into adulthood. This can, in turn, affect an individual’s parenting, as behavioral health issues are likely to pass down to children. According to research conducted at the University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences, severe childhood trauma and stresses early in parents' lives are linked to higher rates of behavioral health problems in their own children.As per Science Daily, here is what the study showed:
The types of childhood hardships included divorce or separation of parents, death of or estrangement from a parent, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, and witnessing violence in the home, exposure to substance abuse in the household, or parental mental illness.
"Previous research has looked at childhood trauma as a risk factor for later physical and mental health problems in adulthood, but this is the first research to show that the long-term behavioral health harms of childhood adversity extend across generations from parent to child," said the study's lead author, Dr. Adam Schickedanz. He is a pediatrician and health services researcher and assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The study showed that the children of parents who themselves had four or more adverse childhood experiences were at double the risk of having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and were four times more likely to have mental health problems.A mother's childhood experiences had a stronger adverse effect on a child's behavioral health than the father's experiences, the study found.
Parents who lived through adverse childhood experiences were more likely to report higher levels of aggravation as parents and to experience mental health problems, the researchers found. However, these mental health and attitude factors only explained about a quarter of the association to their child's elevated behavioral health risks. The remainder of how the parent's adverse childhood experiences are transmitted to their child's behavior deserves further study.
The findings add to the evidence supporting the standardized assessment of parents for adverse childhood experiences during their child's pediatric health visits."If we can identify these children who are at a higher risk, we can connect them to services that might reduce their risk or prevent behavioral health problems," Schickedanz said.
The researchers used information from a national survey containing information from four generations of American families, including information from parents about whether they were abused, neglected or exposed to other family stressors or maltreatment while growing up, and information on their children's behavior problems and medical diagnoses of attention deficit disorder.
With this data, they were able to find strong associations between the parents' adversity histories and their children's behavioral health problems, while controlling for factors such as family poverty and education level.”
Author Denise Shellyann Clarke, who is a CSA survivor with a family of her own now, shares her story in her book, My Protector Was My Molester 978-1-951630-57-7. Clarke faced sexual abuse from a young age that escalated as she grew older. Her abuser was her father, the man who was supposed to protect her from all the bad in the world. Clarke goes on to describe different struggles in life that she had to rise against to become the woman she is today.
Comments