Neurodevelopmental adaptations to violence : how children survive the intragenerational vortex of violence

Perry, Bruce

Neurodevelopmental adaptations to violence : how children survive the intragenerational vortex of violence Perry, Bruce - 1996 - computer file : World Wide Web

This is an Academy version of a chapter in "Violence and Childhood Trauma: Understanding and Responding to the Effects of Violence on Young Children," Gund Foundation Publishers, Cleveland, Ohio, 1996, pp.67-80.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how some children survive given the amount of violence around them. Persisting threat results in persisting fear. Persisting fear and adaptations to the threat present in the vortex of violence alter the development of the child's brain, resulting in changes in physical, emotional, behavioural, cognitive and social functioning. These changes in the developing child, in turn, contribute to the transgenerational cycle of violence as these young children become adolescents - and finally the adults that shape our society, the adults that choose and determine our cultural values, the adults that raise the next generation of children in a new intragenerational vortex of violence.


BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
CHILD EXPOSURE TO VIOLENCE
INFANTS
PSYCHOLOGY
TRAUMA
VIOLENCE
INTERGENERATIONAL VIOLENCE
CHILD ABUSE