The trauma of childhood

As long as they are loved, children can recover from abuse and even the horror of war.

By Alice Miller

June 4, 1999 | We do not arrive in this world as a clean slate. Every new baby comes with a history of its own, the history of the nine months between conception and birth. In addition, children have the genetic blueprint they inherit from their parents. These factors may help determine what kind of a temperament a child will have, what inclinations, gifts and predispositions.

But character depends crucially upon whether a person is given love, protection, tenderness and understanding or exposed to rejection, coldness, indifference and cruelty in the early formative years. The stimulus indispensable for developing the capacity for empathy, say, is the experience of loving care. In the absence of such care, when a child is forced to grow up neglected, emotionally starved and subjected to physical abuse, he or she will forfeit this innate capacity. While I ascribe immense significance to the experiences of infants in the first days, weeks and months of their lives to explain their later behavior, I do not wish to assert that later influences are completely ineffectual. Rather, if a traumatized or neglected child can later come to know what I call an "enlightened" or "knowing witness," he or she can deal positively with the effects of that childhood trauma.

We know today that the brain we are born with is not the finished product it was once thought to be. The structuring of the brain depends very much on the experiences of the first hours, days and weeks of a person's life. In the last few years, scientific studies led by neurologist and child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce D. Perry have further established that traumatized and neglected children display severe lesions affecting up to 30 percent of those areas of the brain that control our emotions. Severe traumas inflicted on infants lead to an increase in the release of stress hormones that destroy the existing, newly formed neurons and their interconnections.

These latest revelations about the human brain might have been expected to bring about a radical change in our thinking about children and the way we treat them. But old habits die hard. Many people now believe that it takes at least two generations for young parents to free themselves of the burden of inherited "wisdom" and stop beating their own children, two generations until it has become sheerly impossible to give one's child a slap "inadvertently," two generations before the weight of newly acquired knowledge gets in the way of the hand raised to deal the "unthinking" blow.

We are often confronted with the belief that the effects of corporal punishment are salutary rather than detrimental. But the only thing beaten children learn is to fear their parents, not to drive carefully or stay out of trouble. They will also feel guilty and learn to play down their own pain. Being subjected to physical attacks they are defenseless to fend off merely instills in children a "gut" conviction that they obviously merit neither protection nor respect. This false message is then stored in the children's bodies as information and will influence their view of the world and their later attitude toward their own children. Such children will be unable to defend their right to human dignity, unable to recognize physical pain as a danger signal and act accordingly. Even their immune system may be affected.

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