The enormous importance of the parenting and care taking style and of not exposing children to stress...

A quick blogposting in the morning, spontaneously thinking loudly.

Read the article ”How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Adult Obesity”.

Reducing the stress, already for the not born baby and by treating it with the greatest respect during its whole childhood (and understanding its "inadequate" reactions), is of enormous importance, not only for the individual and her/his future life and life quality, but also for the society and the world.

With other words we have to treat the children with love, genuine love, and if we can't genuinely love we should be willing to explore why; if it has with us or in fact with the child to do. Maybe what the child is triggering in us.

But if you became stressed and didn't get what you needed early I think you can recover later, with a lot of work though, and recover if your painful experiences aren't/haven't been played down. And by that adults recognize what is actually painful, thus needed to be repressed and/or played down, experiences that are still remaining in the body with all what that means, for the individual and her/his environment wherever this person is in the society.

And this has nothing to do with forgiveness. Even if forgiveness probably can feel good for the moment, because what you are ding when you are forgiving is to deny (more or less) what was done and how painful and even harmful and not right it actually was (meeting evil with evil doesn't solve anything, not even when it comes to a parent meeting a small child's evilness with punishments).

See what Alice Miller has written about this with forgiveness, for instance in "Decepetion Kills Love."

Also see the preface to Alice Miller's book "From Rage to Courage."

And it's crucial how we meet children who have already become traumatized and who are stressed (maybe showing it in hyperactivity) later on. That we are willing to listen to them and not expose them for even more stress and pressure. I'm very critical to the current school politics and they who are responsible for it (and oher politics) in the Swedish government today. See David Korten being shocked that countries like Sweden are on their way of copying his home country USA when it comes to economic politics (causing increasing inequality with everything that follows in the footsteps of this).

And what is hyperactivity about? What is ADHD etc. actually?

The article points out that a child being exposed to another parenting style than her mother's (father's or parents') changes her/his future parenting style. So a child born to a neglectful parent who is raised by a caring caretaker becomes a caring caretaker for her/his children later.

The article also refers to research showing that early stress causes a lot of health troubles of different kinds. Troubles that could become avoided.

I think those (we) could be healed to different degrees if they (we) were allowed to admit to the things we have been exposed and were allowed to call early (and later) experiences in question.

Also read the blogposting (my translation of the heading of the posting from Norwegian to English, but the text in the posting is in English) "Adverse Childhood Experiences and Psychosis."

Psychosocial stressors in children…

from the Swedish child-film Dunderklumpen (1974, English site here and Swedish here), I have played the first tune with a couple of pupils.

Peter Währborg (see former posting "Empathy and Stress...") also writes about children and psychosocial stressors at page 79-81 in his book (mentioned in the former posting).

He writes that in the main the same things which are stressing children are stressing adults.

The most important stressors are emotionally significant separations, for instance parents divorce, but also getting new teachers and classmates. When children loose a part of the body because of illness or accident they react with a powerful stress reaction, as when a person whom is important dies or moves. Children lives in a world which is a little bigger than adults understand Wärhborg writes.

Discomfort (vantrisel) being in a school and a class which only causes social and psychic suffering is of course not fun and causes (sometimes severe) stress in children. If you experience (thinks) you don’t manage especially well in school each failure gives new proofs on your insufficiency or inadequacy. The self esteem is jeopardized, and the inability to live up to the demands parents, teachers or others put turns into chronic stress.

Difficult relations are another source of stress in children. It looks as children in this case reacts more equal to grown up women, i.e., they react more pronounced on difficult relations than men do.

Children have many different sorts of relations which can play a significant or important role for the risk developing stress (my addition: and for minimizing the bad effects?).

Especially powerful are the stress reactions in children exposed to insulting “specific treatment” (särbehandling) or victimization (?) such as mobbing. (See this pdf-file on "Victimization at Work" from the Swedish National Board of Occupational Safety and Health).

Währborg thinks that children’s sensitivity means that the best would be if the classes were small and stable.

Encroachments (abuse), accidents, maltreatment or other severe traumas also causes stress. Sometimes this stress state is of a more serious nature, so called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Not least children who have immigrated can carry things with them that they haven’t got any opportunity to process.

Währborg also mentions time and decision conflicts as a source for stress reactions in children something we also see in adults. When children feel powerlessness or that they don’t have control over their situation they react with stress.

Children suffer more seriously because of lack of security and social stability. The family-situation plays an important role in this (in moderating, and in moderating both this and that?). Here it isn’t only a question of interaction-patterns in the family but also about events happening to the family.

My brief reflections: We have tended to minimize and belittle things children experience, and to sweep it under the rug? And it was even more so earlier? If you didn’t talk about bigger and smaller events or traumas they didn’t harm one thought. And the child and whole events became surrounded by silence.

See about the ACE-study here and here.