A recent study shows that children who have been mistreated respond to certain stimuli as do soldiers who have suffered traumatic war experiences.
This means that, once again, we must emphasize the need to educate children trying to avoid physical abuse that, remember, is illegal in Spain but whose rates, despite recommendations and laws, are still too high .
We are many parents and professionals who have been defending this for some time, an education free of punishments and violence, free of cheeks and spanking for an obvious reason: hurting is not an optimal way to teach children to be good people (in addition to be a bad example).
To explain why it is not acceptable for parents to hit their children we usually make a comparison with the mistreatment of women, changing the word "child" to "woman" in phrases such as "a cheek in time is recommended for women ( children) learn to behave. "
Given this argument, defenders of authoritarian education with permission to cheek say that there is a difference and that it is not comparable: "children must be educated and women should not." However, with this premise, a fact that makes women and children equal is lost, which is the fact of being a person and of deserve to be treated with the same dignity.
How violence affects children's brains
The study I speak of has been conducted at the University of London, being directed by Dr. Eamon McCrory, who has been studying violence and abuse for years, looking for genetic causes and trying to explain it from the point of view of the abuser and especially since The point of view of the abused.
To do the study, the reaction of children who came from aggressive environments was observed by showing photos of people with an angry gesture. The experiment was carried out using brain scans that showed that, seeing the photos, the anterior insula and the cerebral tonsil were suddenly activated, two areas responsible for detect threats in the environment and activate alert mechanisms to prepare the body to fight or flee.
The researchers commented, seeing these reactions, that the brain of abused children learns to protect themselves and becomes hypervigilant. To put it in some way, he is constantly alert, expectant and active, trying to find almost continuously potentially dangerous or threatening signs. This brain activation so large and so constant causes extensive emotional and cognitive wear and produces very high levels of anxiety, something horrible for children, who are much less able to control it (anxiety) than adults.
The reaction of children is the same as that of soldiers after the war
In order to understand the magnitude of these findings, the reaction of the children in the study has been compared with that of soldiers traumatized by war experiences and have concluded that their brains act the same way and react in the same way.
This should make re-educate parents, teachers and in general all adults because, although there are many anti-violence campaigns and despite the fact that the laws have changed, it is estimated that the percentage of abused children ranges between 15% and 18%. In fact, we only have to read some of the news that talk about avoiding cheeks or similar that immediately appear dozens (if not hundreds) of comments defending the cheek in time because "if we can not even do that they will tease us", as if the only educational resource of the parents was that (so many years of evolution and we are still stuck in giving more power to the force than to the morning).
But some children do not react in the same way to violence
Until now it was thought that violence or abuse, although not recommended, did not affect all children equally, because some showed no suffering. According to the researchers, even when the child does not seem to react his brain is (the brain images showed it), something they explain by saying that sometimes the brain is not able to face what happens and "disconnects" the link between emotion and cognition. In other words, it disconnects the thought so that the child does not process what happened and does not suffer it, so that it does not affect him. The problem is that at the neural level everything happens, everything is recorded and everything affects.
The long term consequences
"They hit me as a child and here I am," "this has been done a lifetime," many people say, as if having lived violent scenes had not caused trauma. The fact is that, obviously, not all of us live our childhood immersed in violent environments, luckily, but many do live the cries, threats and cheeks of our parents to a greater or lesser extent.
The appearance of irreversible traumas or not will depend on the seriousness of what happened, and that is why so many people believe that a cheek occasionally does nothing, but what is clear is that violence in childhood produces neurological alterations that modify the personality, the emotional state of the child and the way in which it is related and will be related to the rest of the people during their life.
Among child victims of physical or emotional abuse or neglect, there has been an increased risk of developing mental health problems such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress, depression, dissociation, etc., and it is also known that violence is learned, imitated. Many of today's adults and parents beat their children simply because they were hit. In fact, most believe that it is normal, so it is clear that they have normalized violence as an educational method, when It is not advisable, it is not educational and it is not even normal.
