ACEs & Child Development:

Intro

There are three main domains of development being cognitive, physical, and social/emotional. Let's examine the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences in adulthood more specifically using these domains. It's important to understand that just because a child experiences an adverse event, that doesn't mean that it has traumatized them. Children respond to and are impacted by ACEs differently depending on a number of factors such as PCEs, the number of ACEs, and the frequency of both ACEs and PCEs. So just because these are some common effects in adulthood, it does not mean every child with a high ACE score is bound to these outcomes.

Social/emotional Consequences

Childhood is a vital developmental period for socialization and emotional development. Because it's impossible to know exactly how the effects of an experience will manifest in adulthood, it's best to generalize potential effects based on what has been researched and reported. So adverse experiences like abuse and neglect can deeply impact the way children percieve, trust, and interact with adults and peers. ACEs can cause a child to be avoidant of close relationships, or overly attached, and contribute to increased negative self thought. ACEs have been shown to have a causal relationship with risky behaviors including substance misuse, alcoholism,and risky sexual behavior in adulthood. ACEs can impact the way a child builds and maintains relationships as well as influence their atatchment styles in relationships.

Cognitive Consequences

ACEs can impact brain development in many ways due to the brain going through major developmental changes from infancy to the end of emerging adulthood at 25. ACEs can increase cortisol levels which contributes to stress. This over long periods of time becomes referred to as toxic stress. Toxic stress has many impacts for physical development, but as it pertains to cognitive development, it may cause a child to become hypervigilant to action in their environment. This can manifest into a number of mental health outcomes in adulthood most notably depression and anxiety. Toxic stress causes the body to be in a constant mode of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Thus putting stress on the bodies ability to resume developemnt. This can cause a number of interruptions and structural changes to the way an individual experiences memory, behavior, and learning. This can affect later outcomes in adulthood related to education level, risky behavior, and occupational outcomes.

Physical Consequences

The ways ACEs influence physical development is both direct and indirect. By this I mean that ACEs effect on behavior in adulthood can have implications for physical health. For example, risky behavior, alcoholism, risky sexual behavior, and drug use can can have major effects for overall physical health and contribute to injury, STDs, STIs, organ damage, and so much more. ACEs can also influence physical development on a cellular level. Toxic stress puts the body in constant inflamatory response. This is fine for short periods of time, but in chronic, toxic stress, your body will eventually have to endure the weight of this in the same way that after you workout you don't feel sore until a day or so later. A day or so later being adulthood. Though, instead of sore muscles, this manifests as weakened immune systems responses, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, liver disease, chronic obstuctive pulmonary disease, and much more.

Sources: https://stopabusecampaign.org https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11754674/ https://developingchild.harvard.edu https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30175459