75% of its students are growing up without regular contact with their fathers, 25% without their mothers, and more than 10% are designated homeless (this means they've moved more than 4 times in a year; the state defines this designation).

The teachers are close with the students; we hear stories that tell us who has a really hard childhood. I can emphatically tell you that the harder the student's life is, the more misbehavior they exhibit and the more unhealthy they appear. By "appear" I mean weight, smell, visible grime, cuts and burns, these sorts of things.

Here is a list of signs of child abuse:

http://www.safehorizon.org/page/10-signs-of-child-abuse-58.h...

Here are signs you might not see as abuse when you come across them: thumb-sucking, fear of going home, body odor.

Each of those is easy to criticize or fix: "Get that thumb out of your mouth." "What do you mean you don't want to go home and watch [TV show they've mentioned]?" "[behind their backs] so-and-so stinks."

(put a ":)" after each of those criticisms to see how they could be jokes or a caring statements, depending on tone. Still, they don't go far enough in addressing the underlying problem)

Those criticisms identify the wrong signifier for their sign. The signifier is not sheer childishness (in the case of thumbsucking), but a coping mechanism for abuse.

Anyone who doesn't see this as a sign of abuse is an idiot.

I could have sugar-coated that, but some things need to be said outright.

(It's not a surefire sign of abuse, but if it doesn't qualify as a strong piece of evidence to you, your brain is not working correctly.)

But you do have to be a superhuman listener when you have a thousand things on your mind, several students out of arm's reach yelling at each other, some students leaving the building without permission and without bus passes, etc etc--and then you see a marooned student who looks like he/she doesn't want to go home.

Ultimately, if you're working one-on-one with a student who says he/she doesn't want to go home, in theory all you have to be is caring and curious, to help.

But when you're in a public or charter school and you're always occupied you'll benefit from training (in e.g. crisis prevention), and sensitization to those key phrases. Those two things plus experience lead to intuition.

I had just been mountaineering the day before, which explained the cuts. But the real joke was that I couldn't go home. It was a boarding school. To her credit, she thought I was a day student too afraid to go home. Not to her credit, she should have talked to me or the teacher who took a group of us climbing BEFORE launching an investigation.

I was bored with the common rooms and just wanted to read a book. Where I got and hid the keys she never found out.

Isn't it also bad for a normal child to see out of nowhere unknown people, laywer and their parents scared sh*tless?

Does anyone else get tired of seeing this all the time? It feels like the standard, pat response nowadays of a smart person to basically any association whatever. Of course ice cream sales in the summer don't cause murders, but in turn, I seriously doubt anyone is saying that sexual assault somehow physiologically deforms breast tissue directly leading to carcinoma.

Look, I know very little about medicine, I don't even know that much about statistics. But wouldn't the idea be more like these traumas could stress the body in some way that makes some of its subsystems perform in a degraded manner, which over time develops into illness? As I say, I'm out of my depth here. But that sort of response is starting to strike me as irksomely glib.

You're probably seeing it more often because more people have access to more data than ever before and are making lots of connections that aren't necessarily connected. Floud probably stated it this way because of the inevitable eye-rolling that occurs in reaction to the more common way of saying it: Correlation does not imply causation.

In this case, however, Floud is probably wrong. There is plenty of statistical evidence to prove links between traumatic childhoods and undesirable characteristics in adulthood. It isn't much further of a leap to assert that physical changes, as a result of unnatural levels of stress hormones etc., could occur.

Pretty major known confounding here. Family-based, adoption, twin, GCTA or GWAS studies usually find low effects from shared environment but high heritability or specific hits, especially for addiction & diabetes (stroke and cancer are less well known but still plenty of GWAS hits for those too). And this is true of various aspects of bad parenting like physical abuse as well.

It's also a hell of a lot more depressing if true. We can fix biological issues a hell of a lot more easily than we can convince people to not be so shitty to each other.

That's how we do it. Best of both worlds.

That's because among serious psychologists and those who study genetics, the view advocated here is pretty much exactly wrong: your childhood experiences have almost no effect on the adult you become.

The public and the media tend to believe otherwise, and regularly put out stories like this one, perpetuating the myth. But it's just not true.

We've known for years that the genes you inherit from your parents are far more important than whatever parenting they do. Adopted siblings raised in the same household grow up to be no more similar than strangers plucked off the street. And identical twins raised apart grow up to be ridiculously similar -- almost creepily so -- despite having no shared environment. When you run the correlations, genes turn up as a large factor in every single measurable outcome (education level, income, IQ, height, weight, personality, choice of college major, and so on), whereas shared environment -- where you grew up, how your parents raised you, your socioeconomic status -- begins as a moderate impact while you are a child and then slowly disappears in your teens, until at age 25, your IQ and personality have basically nothing to do with whether your parents read to you at night or spanked you or talked to you or ignored you completely, or what siblings you grew up with, or what house you grew up in, or what town you grew up in.

(Coincidentally, ACE is a relevant acronym here, but it stands for something different than from what it does in the article. Additive genetics, Common environment, and unique Environment are the components of the outcome of twin studies. Common environment is the factor of your parents and household, and unique environment is every other environmental factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods)

Now, there is a small caveat to the above. If you were severely abused as child that can impact you later, but it truly has to be severe abuse. To lower a child's IQ, you'd have to really starve them or deprive them of key nutrients -- but this pretty much never happens in the US. A diet of only McDonald's is more than sufficient to prevent this kind of stunting. Likewise, the sexual or physical abuse would have to be pretty extreme to impact you later -- much more than this story let on.

-----------------

So, the real story behind this NPR piece is that people with bad parents often grow up to have problems not because of bad parenting, but because their bad parents happened to pass them bad genes. In other words, the common cause was that both the child and the parents had bad genes. You should never trust a study about parenting or the effects of the environment if it doesn't take genes into account.

And this is where people get uncomfortable, because no one wants to believe that something you're born with, something you cannot change, is so important to who you are. The "truth" about the effects of genes and your environment does not fit in well with mainstream ideals of equality of opportunity and free will. Thus, the impact of genes are routinely downplayed everywhere you look, and environmental effects are raised up, like in this piece. There is broad, systemic bias at work, making the world out to be the way we want it, rather than the way it really is.

But we do ourselves a profound disservice in this (often unintentional) act of twisting the truth to fit our ideals. It causes grief when we blame fat people for being lazy or lacking self control, when in reality their obesity is largely a product of their genes and the modern phenomenon of cheap and tasty food. We praise smart kids with lucky genes who get A's, while putting down their less bright peers, even if they worked harder, because they only managed to get C's. We love beautiful people, but shun their less appealing peers.

So I ask you: Where is the compassion for those with unlucky genes? Where is the support for those who don't have the talent to live out the American Dream? Why is it that no one knows or cares about genetic luck -- probably the greatest source of inequality and unfairness in our world?

It's true that there are a lot of variables when asking broad questions like what causes poor health, but it seems like the majority of the participants weren't of a lower-socioeconomic demographic, as indicated in the article.

84% where white.

59% of Americans identify as middle class, upper-middle or upperclass. So saying that the study used mostly upper- and middle-class doesn't really tell us anything.

I remain unconvinced that "Family Secrets Make You Sick" based on that article. There are a lot of ways to determine whether that might be the case, but I'm surprised, based on the article's description, that they were able to get a paper published with their method.

That's a terribly unfair dismissal, only possible because you cut the quote in half. Here's what he really said:

"You know, I remember thinking, 'Well, my God, this is the second incest case I've seen in [then] 23 years of practice,' " Felitti says. "And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored."

"Floored" clearly means he found it was more common than he expected—so much so that he devoted the rest of his career to studying its effects.

This was in the 1980s—those are the first three words of the article. Widespread awareness of this was just getting started then. It looks to me like this guy was one of the researchers who pioneered that awareness, and you're criticizing him for lacking it.

> "And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored."

> More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.

Are you saying you're surprised it took 23 years for him to notice? How long should it take, then? I know nothing of his professional background, but don't you think it's possible certain types of doctors are less likely to "see it regularly" than others?

Even today most people don't know that the person most likely to harm a child is their sibling.

To think of how not-rare it is, think of all the heterosexual child abuse that goes on within families. Child abuse is not considered rare. But how many of those abuses might result in pregnancies? Any doctor who deals regularly with young people, specifically young girls who might be pregnant, sees this regularly if they care to look. The pregnant teenager whose boyfriend "isn't around anymore" is a non-rare situation. Some subset of those are pregnant by their fathers/brothers. The problem is that asking, or performing tests that might identify the true father, may do more harm than good. So doctors don't push the matter. That doesn't mean they do not suspect what's going on.

What do you say to a girl pregnant by her brother? Termination is not a great option, the kid may well be healthy. Reporting the abuse, breaking up the household, isn't going to help either. From the doctor's perspective there isn't much they can do.

This attitude, while understandable, is very damaging.

You report the abuse. You do so because your professional registration probably tells you to; there might even be mandatory laws requiring you to; and because you know that you do not have access to reports from other agencies (police, school, sexual health clinics, etc) and so you cannot understand the whole picture.

You're right that interventions for abused children are appalling and that looked after children have some pretty lousy outcomes (shorter life, lower quality of life, increased mental illness, increased risk of death by suicide, increased criminal behaviour, etc etc etc)

Maybe in West Virginia. In most of the world it's a very rare occurrence.