VI. Appendices Appendix

Appendix B: Brain Development

An evaluation of youth violence and options for prevention should be based in brain development. Understanding the interplay between brain development and environmental stresses is helpful in targeting certain age groups for prevention. In particular, such research supports prevention at the earliest stages in a child’s life.

The brain is a dynamic organ that can be altered by good and bad stimulation;B1 the first three years of a child’s life are critically important to brain development.B2 “For millions of American children, the world they encounter is relentlessly menacing and hostile. So, with astounding speed and efficiency, their brains adapt and prepare for battle. Cells form trillions of new connections create the chemical pathways of aggression; chemicals are produced in overabundance; some are repressed.”B3

“New research is redefining the roles of nature and nurture in determining how a child will turn out. In the past, scientists argued that one or the other was more important, beginning to better define the conditions that put children at risk for disease. Finding these children and altering the detrimental experiences as early as possible can change the course of their lives. Jerome Kagan, a Harvard University psychologist, has been trying to do just that. His studies of middle-class Boston children revealed that about one in three had psychological problems primarily related to bad environment.

“The causes are always in the biology of the child, either a certain neurochemistry you inherited, structural abnormalities that occurred prenatally, or a bad environment,” he wrote. “And a bad environment - strife at home, abuse, bad peers, lack of role models - is always the most prevalent cause.””B4

But some children remain resilient to violence, even when subjected to a bad environment.

“The brain is very resilient and maintains an even course in the face of the most outrageous experiences. That’s why most children born in conditions of poverty and violence come out okay. Scientists suspect that the reason some children, regardless of their social or economic status, come out with damaged brains may be that they are genetically more vulnerable to stress. Furthermore, their bad experiences are not neutralized by a caring parent or involved adult. Understanding the potential for environmental stresses to damage the brain, and factors that make some children more resilient to violenceB5, provides options for more effective prevention.

Understanding how the brain can be damaged as a result of bad experiences gives scientists a new opportunity to prevent the damage and to repair it once it has occurred.

According to Dr. Frederick Goodwin, former director of National Institute of Mental Health, “The question is not only, ‘What’s wrong with the environment and what can we do about it?’ but, ‘What makes some kids more vulnerable than others and how can we develop ways to protect them?’” Goodwin said. “That’s the new direction we have to go in. If we did that, we’d need fewer prisons.”B6

Appendix B Footnotes:

B1. Ronald Kotulak, Inside the Brain, (1997) at 42 citing Dr. Robert Post, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s biological psychiatry branch.

B2. Id. at xiii.

B3. Id. at 84.

B4. Id. at 42.

B5. “The things that are associated with resiliency have to do with protective factors like the quality of home life, the parent-child relationship, or another relationship that provides some security for the child,” said Megan Gunnar, a child development psychologist at the University of Minnesota.” Id. at 39.

B6. Id. at 44.