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Given that the United States and the United Kingdom sit at the bottom of the measurement continuum regarding the well-being of their children among the 21 richest nations on earth, I am beginning to seriously rethink my own thinking about the impact of deprivation and trauma on early infant-child development.  Maybe a safe and secure attachment to caregivers and to the world is NOT the norm, as Dr. Daniel Siegel and others suggest at the same time they note that safe and secure attachment seems to exist in roughly half of our nation’s population.

What is life like for the other half who are not safely and securely attached?

Maybe the best possible infant-child interactions with a best possible mother in a best possible benign and benevolent world is a goal the human race is striving toward and is not something we have yet to obtain.  As excited as I have been at discovering Dr. Martin Teicher’s work about how infant-child abuse, deprivation and trauma can create an ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain designed by, for and in a malevolent world, maybe I have to admit that he and his researchers are just plain WRONG.

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What I read in the 2009 Child and Youth Well-Being Index (CWI) projections for 2010 for American children contributes to my revised thinking about the impact of deprivation and trauma on infant-child development.  These findings (below) clearly show us that what is acceptable and ‘normal’ and what is not is entirely subject to the perspective of experience.

This Special Report shows that the impact of the current recession on children in America will be dramatic.

• The percentage of children in poverty is expected to peak at 21 percent in 2010, comparable to that of previous economic recessions.

• More than a quarter (27 percent) or 8 million children will have at least one parent not working full-time year-round in 2010.

• For all families, median annual family income (in constant 2007 dollars) is expected to decline from $59,200 in 2007, to about $55,700 in 2010. For single female-headed households, median annual family income is expected to decline from $24,950 in 2007, to $23,000 in 2010. The steepest drop, however, will be among single male-headed households where median annual family income is expected to decline from $38,100 in 2007 to $33,300 in 2010.

The significant decrease in the family economic well-being domain is projected to cause negative ripple effects across the other domains which the CWI measures.

The Impact on Other CWI Domains

The significant decrease in the family economic well-being domain is projected to cause negative ripple effects across the other domains which the CWI measures.

While the overall impact of the recession on children’s well-being is expected to resemble similar impacts from recessions past, a few trends make this economic downturn unique.  Among them:

• Social relationships domain: The rate of residential mobility for children normally decreases during a recession. Due to the greater severity of the housing crisis accompanying the current economic recession, however, this decline in residential mobility will be counterbalanced by the increased mobility of low-income families that lose their housing and either move or become homeless. For those children, there will be substantial negative impacts on peer and other neighborhood social relationships.

• Health domain: Children’s overall health is expected to decline due to obesity. Though obesity has been on the rise for several years [already the highest of 21 rich nations], it is now likely to spike as the recession drives parents to rely more on low-cost fast food.

While this obesity increase is expected to bring down the health domain, however, there is some positive news. The total number of children with health insurance is expected to remain at just under 90 percent in 2010, due to the fact that government health insurance policies will provide a public safety net for children who are likely to lose private coverage.

Other projected impacts across the domains include:

• Community connectedness domain: The connection that children have to their surrounding communities is likely to be negatively impacted by declines in Pre-Kindergarten participation.

• Safety/behavioral domain: Children’s safety and behavior is expected to fare worse due to higher rates of violent crime where youth are both victims and perpetrators. This is based on historic recessionary trends of budget cuts for policing and juvenile crime prevention.

Finally, the focus of the CWI and its Key Indicators is on national averages across the U.S. and across the population of all children and youths. However, it must be emphasized that there will be a diversity of impacts of the current economic downturn geographically across the nation and across racial/ethnic subpopulations and socioeconomic groups. Low-income African American and Latino children are generally more susceptible to the consequences of economic fluctuations.  When the economy is doing well, their well-being gains are more dramatic; when the economy slumps, they are harder hit than their white counterparts because more children of color live in poverty to begin with.

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It is only in very recent history that life for members of our species on this planet could be said to be easy enough that our numbers are moving ever nearer to the double digit billions.  Yet while the shear masses of our numbers might indicate that we have, as a species, at last reached some suggested height of well-being as a whole, the lack of personal well-being for billions among us on this globe indicate otherwise – our nation’s children included.

Any question of optimism versus pessimism becomes mute in the light of reality.  As a survivor of severe abuse from birth that lasted for the following 18 years of my childhood, it is probably truer that I share more in common with the majority of people on this planet than I do with the privileged, advantaged minority of people who were born into a safe and secure benevolent world.

Taken from this global perspective, Dr. Teicher and others like him who suggest that adjustments in infant-childhood to deprivation and trauma make us into evolutionarily altered people are wrong.  Evolution moves forward.  Anyone who does NOT experience deprivation and trauma in their early life and is formed for a benign world rather than for a harsh and malevolent one might well be considered to be the evolutionary exception rather than the rule.

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