We know that there are many children who struggle with attention and attention regulatory problems. And we know that some of those kids have had absolutely the most perfect, gentle, sweet childhoods. They probably carry a very high genetic load for attention regulatory problems. But, we also know that many of the kids that we see with those problems come out of a context of chaos, and adversity, and so on. If you go down the socioeconomic ladder to kids that are growing up under poverty and you look at those kids in school, you see much more evidence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We, in my own research, I have studied children adopted from orphanages. And part of my interest in those kids is they certainly have been growing up in contexts without the relationship regulators of stress biology. We know that when we look at the biology of stress in the context of the orphanage, we\u2019re seeing very clear evidence of chronic activation of the systems. And, yeah, when they\u2019re adopted, they go into homes with families that have really jumped through a million hoops to adopt them, and are pretty well educated, typically, making reasonable income, because that\u2019s what happens, know how to look for resources for their kids and are doing about everything they can think of. They aren\u2019t perfect parents but I have never met one. I mean, I\u2019m not one. You\u2019re probably not one. Perfection is really a tough one, but they\u2019re, generally speaking, quite good parents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I can look at what the impact of early adversity is on these children\u2019s development. One of the biggest signals we see is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is they have problems regulating attention. And even the ones who are not at the level of being classified with that are struggling on all the kinds of tasks that we have that require using drawing in your prefrontal cortex to regulate your basal ganglia to perform tasks in sort of a competent-we\u2019re doing a lot of work trying to figure out exactly which regions in the prefrontal cortex, which tasks have been the most influenced. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The have problems with working memory. I\u2019m pretty sure that that\u2019s going to be one of the chronic ones. They aren\u2019t too bad on planning, but they certainly have problems with what we call cognitive inhibitory control. Real struggles with playing red light, green light for example. Or Simon Says. Those kind of tasks where you have to inhibit a prepotent response they struggle with. So if you have kids who are growing up chronically in really adverse environments, and they have these attention regulatory problems, they also often have aggression problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And we talk about externalizing. They are the ones that drive you crazy in the classroom. And they\u2019re likely to pop another kid and show real problems with aggression. The kids that we\u2019re seeing out of orphanages have the attention regulatory problems, they don\u2019t, often they don\u2019t have the aggression problems. And we know from research where you improve concurrent parenting that you can really pull externalizing problems down for kids. So we think that what we\u2019re seeing is the impact of early adverse care on brain development in the context of pretty supportive caregiving, and the kids really wanting to do the right thing. But they still can\u2019t do it with their attention. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We know that there are many children who struggle with attention and attention regulatory problems. And we know that some of those kids have had absolutely the most perfect, gentle, sweet childhoods. They probably carry a very high genetic load for attention regulatory problems. But, we also know that many of the kids that we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1669","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1670,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1669\/revisions\/1670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}