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redrix 21 hours ago [-]
I remember having it drilled into me in High School that unless you did well on your finals:
1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted.
2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career.
3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.
Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
NewJazz 20 hours ago [-]
I remember having it drilled into me in high school that I was procrastinating school work while at my mom's to avoid spending time with my dad and I was faking my sobbing for sympathy and I was a horrible person who was lucky to have a dad as good as I had and how I keep doing the same things wrong and I am a smartass prick who doesn't care about anyone but myself.
12-14 was rough.
School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
squigz 3 hours ago [-]
This is what I think of when I think of "early life stress" in kids - not worrying about school.
mrguyorama 2 hours ago [-]
It's called "Adverse Childhood Experiences", or ACEs, and the field of psychology has found them to be extremely good predictors of future negative outcomes for a long time now.
Things like abuse, neglect, natural disasters, basically anything that can cause trauma or significant stress.
Be a toddler and your mom's new boyfriend abuses both of you? Congrats, you brain has developed in a way that will not be conducive at all to your future, because instead of developing a functional reward system, you've developed a specific hyperawareness to manage the difficulty of living around one kind of abuser. This incredibly specific adaptation will of course, not prevent you from being an easy target for an entirely different type of abuser in high school.
(It's actually not that simple of course. Multiple ACEs are predictive of future troubles, not just one, so it's more like "A child who lives in an environment of constant stress, fear, and pain is likely to have a brain that didn't develop well" with a direction of effect unstated)
This is one reason why things like abuse and poverty are so damn cyclical. Your parents grew up in poverty and with abusive parents, so they have an elevated chance to abuse their children, and on and on and on.
This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids, and in the US, it also eliminates the horrific humiliation machine we've built around paying for school lunch, which might not be the best way to raise kids anyway.
golly_ned 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's what they mean by 'early-life'.
syllogism 14 hours ago [-]
The optimal amount of stress about that stuff is not zero, and most teenagers are going to be desperately biased towards "none of this matters, just peermax".
coldtea 12 hours ago [-]
The healthy reaction for 16-18 years old is to not give a damn about that, rebel, and discover the other (or the same) sex and partying.
euroderf 11 hours ago [-]
Not to mention having all this on your permanent record.
leoh 18 hours ago [-]
I remember having this in middle school, it was a nightmare and majorly fucked me up
ls612 19 hours ago [-]
In mice.
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Inmiced above.
leoh 18 hours ago [-]
"In mice" is the right caveat for outcomes and the wrong one for mechanisms. Nobody’s selling you a drug here--they’re describing a chromatin change, and that’s the part rodents are actually good for.
The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.
18 hours ago [-]
sph 16 hours ago [-]
These pop-sci articles annoy me greatly. All I can think reading the title is “well, duh?” - they’re a complete tautology.
Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.
If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.
This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”
hamper653 10 hours ago [-]
> Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it.
That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.
naikrovek 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jdw64 18 hours ago [-]
Then my brain must be full of scars.
nemosaltat 21 hours ago [-]
When our Little, Stuart falls down we don’t even know what he remembers. [in mice]
1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted. 2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career. 3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.
Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
12-14 was rough.
School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/
Things like abuse, neglect, natural disasters, basically anything that can cause trauma or significant stress.
Be a toddler and your mom's new boyfriend abuses both of you? Congrats, you brain has developed in a way that will not be conducive at all to your future, because instead of developing a functional reward system, you've developed a specific hyperawareness to manage the difficulty of living around one kind of abuser. This incredibly specific adaptation will of course, not prevent you from being an easy target for an entirely different type of abuser in high school.
(It's actually not that simple of course. Multiple ACEs are predictive of future troubles, not just one, so it's more like "A child who lives in an environment of constant stress, fear, and pain is likely to have a brain that didn't develop well" with a direction of effect unstated)
This is one reason why things like abuse and poverty are so damn cyclical. Your parents grew up in poverty and with abusive parents, so they have an elevated chance to abuse their children, and on and on and on.
This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids, and in the US, it also eliminates the horrific humiliation machine we've built around paying for school lunch, which might not be the best way to raise kids anyway.
The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.
Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.
If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.
This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”
That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.