Almost half of the nation's children have been exposed to traumatic experiences such as witnessing violence or living with a parent who is an alcoholic or drug addict, and these kids are much more likely to bully, repeat grades in school, and have learning problems. That's according to a new report released today from Child Trends, a Washington non-profit research organization that analyzed some of the first nationally representative data on the topic.
When it comes to exposure to these "adverse childhood experiences," or ACEs as they're called in research circles, Ohio's children uniformly fared worse than the rest of the country. In this state, about one in seven kids has been exposed to more than three of these traumatic experiences-- which researchers have known for decades have a cumulative long-term health effect and can lead to alcoholism, mental illness, and obesity in adulthood.
The report echoes findings from one of the largest studies on the topic, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, which surveyed 17,000 adults in the Kaiser Permanente HMO from 1995 to 1997 about their childhood experiences of trauma, neglect and family dysfunction. That study, and others, have found a dose response relationship between ACEs and poor health outcomes in adulthood, linking the traumas to headaches, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and obesity.
[For more of this story, written by Brie Zeltner, go to http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2014/07/almost_half_of_us_kids_suffer.html]
Comments (2)