Act Your Age!
Child Development and ACEs
As children grow, they undergo several stages of development. Positive experiences and healthy relationships during these stages can positively affect children’s school performance, health outcomes, future relationships, and successes throughout life. Understanding these developmental stages can help caregivers provide the necessary support to their children and know what to expect at every step.
Negative experiences like childhood traumas (ACEs) can affect children’s developing brains and immune systems. While ACEs do have a noticeable short-term impact on children’s development and behavior, they can also lead to lifelong health, social, behavioral, and learning problems. ACEs change how children respond to stress so significantly that the effects can surface even decades later. Despite the potential seriousness of ACEs, caregivers and other positive role models can help children build resilience to overcome them.
Child Development
Understanding how the average child or youth develops can broaden a caregiver’s knowledge of what to expect at different ages and how to support healthy development. Kinship caregivers may take on their caregiving responsibilities at different stages in a child’s life; understanding the typical developmental stages helps caregivers know what milestones their child should have already reached, and what milestones their children should reach next.
Developmental Milestones
What are Developmental Milestones? “Skills such as taking a first step, smiling for the first time, and waving "bye-bye" are called developmental milestones. Developmental milestones are things most children can do by a certain age. Children reach milestones in how they play, learn, speak, behave, and move (like crawling, walking, or jumping).” (CDC, 2021a, p. 1)
As you reveal the milestones associated with different ages according to the CDC, note that development may look different for children who have common non-typical developmental or emotional disorders (ASD, ADHD, FASD, depression, and anxiety).
The next three videos will help us understand how early experiences and interactions shape a developing brain and how toxic stress can derail brain development.
Experiences Build Brain Architecture
The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through a process that begins early in life and continues into adulthood. Your brain is building circuits that allow you to do an action. Simpler circuits come first, and more complex circuits develop later.
Genes provide the basic blueprint for these circuits, but experiences influence how or whether genes are expressed. Together, genetics and experiences shape the brain architecture and establish a foundation for all the things we will be able to learn and do.
The ability for the brain to learn, reorganize, and adapt is the strongest at our earliest years in life.
Serve and Return Interaction Shapes Brain Circuitry
One activity that helps develop the brain’s architecture is ‘serve and return.’ This is a type of interaction between the child and the critical caregivers in the child’s life.
Young children will naturally seek interaction through babbling or making facial expressions or gestures. When adults respond with the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing, we help build communication pathways.
This back-and-forth process is essential for brain development throughout childhood.
Did you know that babbling and games like peek-a-boo were important for building babies’ and toddlers’ brains? They are!
Toxic Stress Derails Healthy Development
Learning how to deal with stress is integral to brain development. Small bouts of moderate anxiety can promote growth. Adults can help children learn how to manage these little moments of stress.
However, extreme stress that lasts for a prolonged period without relief is known as toxic stress. Often this kind of stress occurs when an adult is not there to help children manage stress or when an adult cannot help manage stress. Examples include when a child experiences extreme poverty, neglect, or abuse.
Toxic stress can weaken the brain architecture, impacting learning, behavior, and health.
Did you know that stress could be both good and bad depending on the severity and length of time?
Facilitating Development through Play
Play is the serious work of children (and youth)! Researchers have studied brain development and reported that the young adult brain (prefrontal cortex) is still developing until 25 years old! Simple games and activities like the one below can promote healthy brain development.
Activity: Play-dough Sculptures
Get some containers of play-dough. Then, use your imagination to create an art piece that represents something special in your life and encourage your child to sculpt as well. Exchange different colors of dough with each other to make your sculptures even more interesting. When you're finished, take a moment for each of you to share what your sculpture is and why its important.
Sculpting with play-dough or other fun arts and crafts activities can help children learn critical developmental tasks. This one simple activity facilitated the use of creativity, spatial awareness, social and emotional reflection, communication, and cognitive/intellectual skills.
The following section may evoke sensitive feelings. While digesting this information, reach out to your support network or take a break if you are feeling overwhelmed.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
Children in kinship families are likely to have experienced ACEs, which led to their placement with a kinship caregiver in the first place. ACEs can impact the way that children’s brains process stress, and thus, ACEs can impact their development. Understanding what ACEs are and identifying whether their child or youth has experienced ACEs can help caregivers learn how to best support them.
The ACEs infographic highlights that childhood experiences can have a tremendous effect in various ways throughout a person's life. The three types of ACEs include:
- abuse - physical, emotional, or sexual
- neglect - physical or emotional
- household dysfunction - mental illness, domestic violence, divorce, incarceration, and substance abuse.
Download
The Truth About ACEs Infographic
The ACEs infographic from the Robert Wood Johnston Foundation shows the lifelong repercussions of adverse childhood experiences.
ACEs Questionnaire
This questionnaire was used to assess participants in the original Adverse Childhood Experiences study, conducted by CDC and Kaiser Permanente and published in 1998. This widely used and validated tool is used by trained providers to measure the impact of childhood abuse and neglect upon health and well-being.