Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE)

Yesterday while I was on the road I made good use of my time (and played with my new Bluetooth earpiece) and returned several phone calls. One call was to one of the most awesome moms I have met in this gig … the mom I wrote about in this post. In a nutshell, her son has serious attachment and trauma issues as a result of repeated medical procedures. He’s not yet three years old, but he’s quite angry. He sees his mother as both the source of his abuse (she took him to doctors) and his protector. She is still struggling to find the right kind of help. Several things she shared with me really bothered me. First of all, she articulates… [more]

There are some final thoughts I would like to share from the article entitled: The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead. The authors of the ACE Study have come to completely embrace the concept that negative early childhood experiences have a profound impact upon one’s adult life—both physically and emotionally. Furthermore, the authors point out how rarely the medical/professional community recognizes or acknowledges this correlation. The authors compare this dilemma to the relationship between smoke and fire. They point out that firefighters long ago learned the relationship between cause and effect; thus they carry water hoses to fight the fire within the building, rather than fans to blow away the smoke emanating from the burning structure… [more]

Continuing with my discussion about the ACE Study… it is interesting to note what the authors of the study consider to be their two most significant findings: that adverse childhood experiences are “far more common that recognized or acknowledged”, and that such negative early childhood experiences “have a powerful relation to adult health a half-century later.” If you read the breakdown of the categories studied, you realize most of our kids were not exposed to only one negative experience. Most of our kids (and most of the folks in this study) had multiple “traumas”. In fact, the study reports that one quarter of the participants were exposed to two of the adverse experiences, and one out of every 16 participants experienced four of… [more]

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study is an ongoing evaluation of the effects of less-than-optimal childhoods on adult mental and physical health. I am fascinated by this study, for it is proving to be a good indicator of the price our society pays for not addressing the needs of our children when they are still children! How many of us have lobbied and begged and pleaded and cajoled and threatened and sued our schools and mental health professionals in an attempt to get them to sit up and take notice of the special needs of our children? Why is this such a mystery to so many people? How can anyone expect that a child who grows up in or is exposed during critical… [more]

I receive a steady stream of electronic newsletters. There’s the Children’s Bureau Express and the publication that originates from the Evan B. Donaldson Institute. The Child Information Gateway has an e-newsletter. And here’s one called the NRCFCPPP (National Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning.) It was through these informative newsletters that I learned about the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. The Kaiser Permanente HMO and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are collaborating on a major research project to study the effects of negative childhood experiences on adult physical and emotional health. In an article titled: The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning gold into lead, it asks the question… How does this happen… [more]