Moving away from some more silly and interesting research, let's talk about Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) and the way that they can continue to affect someone's life years down the road. It's no surprise that having traumatic events in one's childhood can negatively impact someone's life, but we often think of it as being something that will eventually phase out of memory and the person will be able to move on from it. Research, however, says something completely different.
ACEs are defined as "potentially traumatic events that occur in childhoods. ACEs can include violence, abuse, and growing up in a family with mental health or substance use problems. (CDC). This can also include physically or emotionally neglect, something which has only more recently been added to the definition, especially in Cycle of Violence Theory. The impacts of ACEs. can be categorized into two sections, external and internal.
Internal: In a 2021 journal article, researchers explored the question of "to what degree does childhood adversity contribute to preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the US" and the results were kind of astonishing. ACEs contribute to a myriad of health outcomes such as heart disease, cancer, and chronic lower respiratory disease. One of the biggest things, however, is that 1 in every 3 suicide attempts can be attributed to ACEs.
External: The National Institute of Justice had an article published in 2017 that discussed connections between child maltreatment (one thing about research is that there is a lot of terminology used for the same concepts) and criminal behavior in adulthood.
ACEs increased the risk of anti-social and criminal behavior, though there were differences when gender was taken into consideration. With men, having a caring romantic relationship in adulthood actually decreased the risk, but the same wasn't true with women.
Why is this important to research? Well, while I love the idea of learning for learning's sake, there is a real world application to this. This is just further proof that we need to pay more attention to children who have experiences ACEs. and increase available resources to them. According to the CDC, only about 20% of children with "mental, emotional, or behavior disorders receive care from a specialized mental heath care provider."
Grummitt LR, Kreski NT, Kim SG, Platt J, Keyes KM, McLaughlin KA. Association of Childhood Adversity With Morbidity and Mortality in US Adults: A Systematic Review. JAMA Pediatr. 2021;175(12):1269–1278. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.2320