You see this everywhere you go in the city: Poor people screaming at their kids. And we can’t do a fucking thing about it until we’re willing to spend some money on real support services:
Not legally defined as child abuse, it’s known as harsh or authoritarian parenting. Regardless of race or income level, mothers and fathers everywhere are capable of it.
But low-income parents who struggle with stresses from overwhelming issues such as hunger, or lack of a job or adequate housing, seem to engage in harsh parenting more often, researchers have concluded.
And children in poverty suffer from it in ways science is just beginning to understand.
Harsh parenting unleashes so-called toxic stress in children, researchers say, changing the structure and functionality of their brains, heightening chances for negative behavior, and potentially condemning a child to a life hampered by heart disease, among other maladies.
“This is an incredibly important public-health issue,” said Joan Luby, professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. After studying 145 children over 12 years, she authored an article about the effect of poverty on children’s brains in the journal JAMA Pediatrics in October.
Think of harsh parenting as an agent as destructive as lead poisoning, said Daniel Taylor, a pediatrician at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in North Philadelphia.
Such parenting, often involving “quick ‘do-as-I-say’ orders from Mom or Dad without the buffering effect of a loving, supportive attitude,” causes the release in children of stress hormones such as cortisol that are toxic to developing brains, Taylor said.
One possible consequence is damage to a child’s amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates emotion. The child becomes hyperactive, gets into fights, has attention deficits, and cannot be calm, Taylor said.
This could be read in a different way by substituting the words “political leaders” for “parents” and “we the people” for “children.” If one does that everything becomes much clearer about our lives and how we respond to events.