Category: Child Psychology

Around one-third of children around the world suffer this type of abuse.

Emotional abuse of children can be just as harmful as physical abuse, a new study finds.

Emotional abuse includes behaviours like intimidation, humiliation and rejection.

Around one-third of children around the world suffer emotional abuse, which is far more common than physical abuse.

Professor David Vachon, the study’s first author, said:

“…although people assume physical abuse is more harmful than other types of abuse, we found that they are associated with similar consequences.

These consequences are wide-ranging and include everything from anxiety and depression to rule-breaking and aggression.”

The researchers studied 2,300 children who attended a summer camp over 20 years.

The children were from low-income families and aged between 5 and 13-years-old.

The results overturned some common assumptions, Professor Vachon explained:

“We also tested other assumptions about child maltreatment, including the belief that each type of abuse has specific consequences, and the belief that the abuse has different consequences for boys and girls of different races.

We found that these assumptions might also be wrong.

In fact, it seems as though different types of child abuse have equivalent, broad, and universal effects.”

The research should help change how people think about child abuse, Professor Vachon said:

“One implication, is that effective treatments for maltreatment of any sort are likely to have comprehensive benefits.

Another implication is that prevention strategies should emphasize emotional abuse, a widespread cruelty that is far less punishable than other types of child maltreatment.

One plan is to examine the way abuse changes personality itself — does it change who we are?

The point is to go beyond symptoms and ask whether abuse changes the way we tend to think, feel, and act.”

The study was published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry (Vachon et al., 2015).

Image credit: Vale

The effect of pressure to be on social media 24/7 on young people’s mental state.

Pressure to be available 24/7 on social media is linked to depression, anxiety and poor sleep amongst teenagers.

Adolescents who are emotionally invested in social media have worse psychological well-being, a new study has found.

They typically felt under pressure to react and respond to texts and posts immediately.

Dr Cleland Woods, the study’s lead author, said:

“Adolescence can be a period of increased vulnerability for the onset of depression and anxiety, and poor sleep quality may contribute to this.

It is important that we understand how social media use relates to these.

Evidence is increasingly supporting a link between social media use and wellbeing, particularly during adolescence, but the causes of this are unclear.”

The study included 467 teenagers who were asked about their social media use and levels of anxiety and depression.

Dr Woods said:

“While overall social media use impacts on sleep quality, those who log on at night appear to be particularly affected.

This may be mostly true of individuals who are highly emotionally invested.

This means we have to think about how our kids use social media, in relation to time for switching off.”

The study was presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference 2015 in Manchester, UK.

Social media image from Shutterstock

The change to the school week that surprisingly improves children’s academic performance.

A four-day school week increases young children’s academic performance, a new study finds.

Researchers were surprised to discover that a four-day week did not have any detrimental effects on academic performance.

Dr Mary Beth Walker, one of the study’s authors, said:

“What interested me about our results is they were completely opposite to what we anticipated.

We thought that especially for the younger, elementary school kids, longer days on a shorter school week would hurt their academic performance because their attention spans are shorter.

Also, a longer weekend would give them more opportunity to forget what they had learned.”

Instead, though, math scores were higher for fourth- and fifth-grade students.

Reading scores were unaffected by a switch to a four-day-week.

Some schools in rural areas of the US already operate on four-day weeks to lower costs.

Typically, though, for the four-day week the school day was longer to meet minimum teaching requirements.

Dr Walker said:

“We thought the longer days might give teachers an opportunity to use different kinds of instructional processes.

We also speculated that a four-day school week lowered absenteeism, so students who had dentist’s appointments or events might be able to put those off until Friday and not miss school.

We thought there might be less teacher absenteeism.

My own personal hypothesis is teachers liked it so much–they were so enthusiastic about the four-day week–they did a better job.

There’s some evidence in other labor studies that four-day work weeks enhance productivity.”

The research was published in the journal Education Finance and Policy (Anderson & Walker, 2015).

Child image from Shutterstock

How parents can offset these damaging effects on their children.

Growing up in poverty — as do 22% of children in the US — has alarming, long-term effects on the brain, new studies conclude.

This can lead to long-term problems with depression, anxiety, learning difficulties and issues dealing with stress.

Professor Joan L. Luby, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our research has shown that the effects of poverty on the developing brain, particularly in the hippocampus, are strongly influenced by parenting and life stresses experienced by the children.”

Children from low-income families scored 20% lower on standardised tests, new research has found.

This lowered performance was linked to slow development in the frontal and temporal regions of the brain.

However, these damaging effects of poverty on the brain can be offset.

Parents from low-income families who nurture their children can reduce some of these negative effects.

Teaching parents these nurturing skills — especially those living on low incomes — may be extremely beneficial for children.

Professor Luby writes in an editorial:

“In developmental science and medicine, it is not often that the cause and solution of a public health problem become so clearly elucidated.

It is even less common that feasible and cost-effective solutions to such problems are discovered and within reach.” (Luby, 2015)

The research was published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics (Hair et al., 2015).

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Large new study reveals just how harmful psychological abuse in childhood can be.

Children who are neglected and emotionally abused experience similar, if not worse, psychological problems than those who are sexually or physically abused.

Despite this, childhood victims of psychological mistreatment rarely receive treatment and their suffering frequently goes unidentified.

Those are the conclusions of a new study of 5,616 youths who had faced different types of childhood abuse (Spinazzola et al., 2014).

The study is published in the journal Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy.

The study looked at three different types of maltreatment:

• Psychological maltreatment: this includes both emotional abuse or emotional neglect.
• Physical abuse.
• Sexual abuse.

Of the youths in the study, 62% had experienced psychological maltreatment, along with other types, while 24% of the children had suffered purely psychological abuse.

Psychological maltreatment included things like using threats, debasing children, ignoring them or bullying and terrorising them.

Children were between 10 and 12-years-old at the start of the study and were followed for around six years.

The results showed that psychological abuse led to similar rates of suicidality, stress, depression, anxiety and low self-esteem as did sexual and physical abuse — in some cases more.

The links found were strongest between psychological abuse and depression, social and general anxiety disorder and substance abuse.

Children who suffered both psychological and physical/sexual abuse had the worst outcomes.

Dr. Joseph Spinazzola, the Executive Director of the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute, and the study’s lead author, said:

“Child protective service case workers may have a harder time recognizing and substantiating emotional neglect and abuse because there are no physical wounds.

Also, psychological abuse isn’t considered a serious social taboo like physical and sexual child abuse.

We need public awareness initiatives to help people understand just how harmful psychological maltreatment is for children and adolescents.”

Almost 3 million children in the US experience some kind of maltreatment each year.

Usually it is from a parent, family member or primary caregiver.

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Why children grow at the pace of reptiles rather than mammals.

In comparison to many other closely-related species, the human child takes a long time to grow up and requires a correspondingly high degree of parental investment.

Human infants are more like reptiles than mammals in the amount of time it takes for them to reach maturity.

A new study finds that one reason is the enormous amount of energy that the brain requires as it grows.

Christopher Kuzawa, first author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explained:

“Our findings suggest that our bodies can’t afford to grow faster during the toddler and childhood years because a huge quantity of resources is required to fuel the developing human brain.

As humans we have so much to learn, and that learning requires a complex and energy-hungry brain.”

The study reached this conclusion by pooling data from MRI and PET studies which measure both the brain’s volume and its glucose uptake (Kuzawa et al., 2014).

These show that at the moment when children’s bodies grow the least — on average, at four-years-old — their brains are eating up the highest percentage of glucose.

At four-years-old, that means 40% of the child’s total energy expenditure is being used by its brain.

The findings support the theory that children take so long to mature because of the energy-intensive task of growing a massively over-sized brain.

Over-sized, that is, in comparison to the brain-to-body weight ratio of other species (ants, for example, also have massive brains in comparison to their body-weight).

Kuzawa continued:

“After a certain age it becomes difficult to guess a toddler or young child’s age by their size.

Instead you have to listen to their speech and watch their behavior. Our study suggests that this is no accident.

Body growth grinds nearly to a halt at the ages when brain development is happening at a lightning pace, because the brain is sapping up the available resources.”

“The mid-childhood peak in brain costs has to do with the fact that synapses, connections in the brain, max out at this age, when we learn so many of the things we need to know to be successful humans.”

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Why some children find it hard to read and deal with complicated classroom instructions.

Working memory is a crucial factor in children’s academic achievement, including their reading ability.

Working memory is the ability to hold pieces of information in the mind and manipulate them, as well as the ability to stay on-task and ignore distractions.

The study, which was conducted in Brazil, included 106 children, half of whom were living under the poverty line (Abreu et al., 2014).

The children took a battery of cognitive tests — including one assessing their working memory — and these were matched up with their attainment in mathematics, spelling, reading, language and science.

The results showed that the children with the best working memories consistently had the highest performance across all the different areas of learning.

The children who struggled, especially with reading, were those with the poorest working memory.

The project’s leader, Dr. Pascale Engel de Abreu, said:

“Our findings suggest the importance of early screening and intervention, especially in the context of poverty.

At present, poor working memory is rarely identified by teachers.

Poor literacy, low academic achievement and living in poverty create a mutually reinforcing cycle.

There is a chance to break this by early identification of children with working memory problems and by helping them to acquire the mental tools which will enable them to learn.”

This study backs up a consistent finding from the English-speaking world that a strong working memory is important for academic achievement.

The authors conclude:

“…many classroom situations place heavy demands on the working memory system because children are required frequently to hold information in mind while engaging in effortful activities.

Lengthy and complex classroom instructions or difficult task structures can lead to working memory overload in children with poor working memory function.

This can result in task failure or abandonment, in other words, missed learning opportunities that negatively affect normal rates of learning.” (Abreu et al., 2014).

Image credit: Lotus Carroll