Memory also suffers
Mental health problems in children are closely linked to stressful early childhood experiences. According to a new study, this also has consequences for vocabulary and memory.
Parents are divorced, there is violence in the family or a serious illness: when young children have such stressful experiences, their risk of mental health problems increases significantly. And this in turn harms their cognitive development, as a research group concludes from test results of more than 13,000 children.
The data comes from a British longitudinal study, reports the team led by Tochukwu Nweze from the University of Cambridge in the scientific journal "Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry". The children, born between 2000 and 2002 in the UK, completed several tests during the course of the study. According to the results, stress up to the age of 3 was closely associated with mental health problems at all ages. It also increased the risk of having a weaker working memory at the age of 11 and a smaller vocabulary at the age of 14. Mental health explained just under 60 per cent of the differences in memory performance at age 11 and 70 per cent of vocabulary at age 14.
The results are consistent with other British long-term data, according to which stressful experiences in the first three years of life in particular lead to mental illness. According to the common explanation, children react particularly sensitively to stress and trauma during this early developmental phase.
Early treatment mitigates the long-term consequences
"This emphasises the need for early intervention," says Tochukwu Nweze. If the psychological sequelae were treated, this could also mitigate the consequences of childhood trauma for cognitive development. The current results show that If the psychological problems decrease again over the course of childhood, working memory and vocabulary are less impaired later on.
There is no doubt that childhood trauma can have numerous serious consequences. However, even this large long-term study cannot provide a definitive answer as to how exactly they work. It is also conceivable that there are other causes behind the observed correlations that were not taken into account in this study.
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Cover photo:© Mizina / Getty Images / iStock (detail) / Mental pain can have long-lasting effects
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