Source: WikiMedia Commons
Last month, it was reported that an Edmonton woman was badly beaten by her spouse. Though the attack put her in the hospital, the police offered a silver lining by stating that her unborn baby, at least, wasn't harmed.
Sadly, this claim underestimates the profound effect severe stress can have on children's development in their first years of life, including while they're still in the womb. To help end the cycles of violence that all too often lead to these situations, we must understand the full effects of abuse and neglect early in life — and what can be done to correct them.
Evidence shows that exposure to their mothers' prenatal stress in consistently high doses — a state called "toxic stress" — affects fetal and infant brain architecture, placing the growing child at risk for numerous emotional and intellectual challenges. Exposed children have a harder time paying attention to instructions, and fare worse in puzzles and activities designed to measure cognitive ability.
The main culprit in these cases is a stress hormone called cortisol. Though made naturally in our bodies and a key part of our stress response system, cortisol can be nasty stuff in large doses. Our glands produce it in times of real or perceived danger, where it shifts us into a kind of emergency mode: redistributing energy from our organs to our major muscle groups — the better to flee or fight with — and shutting down our immune and digestive systems to concentrate on the more immediate task of survival.
All of this is of great importance when fleeing from a tiger, or battling a warring tribe, or facing one of the other myriad dangers that plagued our distant ancestors. But in the face of extreme stress experienced by some people today, it can become a liability, as its presence prevents the body from returning to its pre-stressed state, called homeostasis.
Homeostasis is where our bodies function most optimally. If we lose the ability to downshift to this lower gear, the damage over the long term — the wear and tear, so to speak — can be considerable. Prolonged exposure to toxic stress has been linked to depression, heart disease, diabetes, and alcoholism — diseases we associate with adulthood, but whose seeds are often sown in the first years of our lives.
http://www.therecord.com/opinion-story/4488875-prenatal-stress-can-have-toxic-effects-on-infants/
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