Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina Page A

seldom held or given deliberate sensory stimulation. Many were found tied to their beds, left alone for hours or days, with bottles of gruel propped haphazardly into their mouths. Many infants stared blankly into space. Indeed, you could walk into some of these hundred-bed orphanages and not hear a sound. Blankets were covered in urine, feces, and lice. The childhood mortality rate in these institutions was sickening, termed by some Westerners “pediatric Auschwitz.”
    Horrible as these conditions were, they created a real opportunity to investigate—and perhaps treat—large groups of severely traumatized children. One remarkable study involved Canadian families who adopted some of these infants and raised them back home. As the adopted children matured, researchers could easily divide them into two groups. One group seemed remarkably stable. Social behavior, stress responses, grades, medical issues—all were indistinguishable from healthy Canadian controls. The other group seemed just as remarkably troubled. They had more eating problems, got sick more often, and exhibited increasingly aggressive antisocial behaviors. The independent variable? The age of adoption.
    If the children were adopted before the fourth month of life, they acted like every other happy kid you know. If they were adopted after
the eighth month of life, they acted like gang members. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly caused immense stress to their systems. And that stress affected these children’s behavior years later. They may have been removed from the orphanages long ago, but they were never really free.

How babies respond to stress
    What stress does is kick into action our “fight or flight” responses. They really should just be called “flight,” though. The typical human stress response is devoted to a single goal: getting enough blood into your muscles to get you out of harm’s way. We generally lash out only when cornered. Even then, we usually engage in combat just long enough to escape. When threatened, the brain signals the release of two hormones, epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) and cortisol, from a class of molecules termed glucocorticoids.
    These responses are complex enough that it takes time to properly tune every connection. That’s what the first year of life is for. If the infant is marinated in safety—an emotionally stable home—the system will cook up beautifully. If not, normal stress-coping processes fail. The child is transformed into a state of high alert or a state of complete collapse. If the baby regularly experiences an angry, emotionally violent social environment, his vulnerable little stress responders turn hyper-reactive, a condition known as hypercortosolism. If the baby is exposed to severe neglect, like the Romanian orphans, the system becomes under-reactive, a condition known as hypocortisolism (hence the blank stares). Life, to quote Bruce Springsteen, can seem like one long emergency.
What happens when you fight
    You don’t have to raise kids under death-camp conditions to see negative changes in baby brain development. All you need are parents who, on a regular basis, wake up wanting to throw emotional punches
at each other. Marital conflict is fully capable of hurting a baby’s brain development. Though there is some controversy about this, the effects may be long lasting, echoing clear into adulthood. And that’s sad, because the effects are fully reversible. Even infants taken from severely traumatized homes and placed in empathic, nurturing environments, if younger than 8 months, can show improvements in their stress-hormone regulation in as little as 10 weeks. All you have to do is put down the boxing gloves.
    What exactly can happen if you don’t?
    Every parent knows children become stressed when their kids see them fighting. But the age at which they can react was completely unexpected by researchers. Infants younger than 6 months