"When trauma happens, it changes a person, but children are particularly vulnerable because they're going through key developmental stages," she said. "So the earlier someone is traumatized, the more profound an effect it has on them."
A new report released last week from Child Trends, a Washington non-profit, shed some light on just how pervasive childhood trauma is -- 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.
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.
[For more of this story, written by Brie Zeltner, go to http://www.cleveland.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2014/08/children_coping_with_trauma_of.html]
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