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Your Child's Psychological Health
| Article
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16827 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
1,004 Words |
| Author
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Elyse Levine
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A four-year-old child develops a stress-related ulcer; an eight-year-old girl, taunted by classmates about her bulky build, starves herself to a skeletal fragility; a thirteen-year-old boy, frustrated after failing another class, finds solace in drugs; a depressed seventeen-year-old girl contemplates ending her life.
Childhood should be a happy and carefree stage of life. Why, then, are some children racked with problems? Why are they unable to get along with their parents, make friends, achieve in school, or exhibit self-control? What makes some children painfully shy, or some, at the other extreme, aggressive bullies?
For centuries we have known that emotional disturbances can have biological, as well as environmental, origins. Yet many parents of emotionally disturbed children still feel stigmatized. Sharon Weinstein, psychiatrist at the Hall-Mercer Center for Children and Adolescents at McLean's Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, notes that until quite recently parents were fingered as a primary cause of severe mental illness. She observes that in the fifties, mothers were frequently blamed. "A popularly held notion was that schizophrenogenic mothers contributed to schizophrenia in their children," she says. "With autism they used to refer to 'refrigerator parent'; that coldness on the part of the parent was thought to contribute to these disorders."
Today, psychologists and psychiatrists recognize that schizophrenia and autism are caused largely by biological factors: nervous systems misfiring signals to the brain; too much or too little of chemicals essential to proper brain function; or damage to the brain during birth. Other theories say that some disorders, such as depression and substance abuse, target genetically predisposed children and adolescents.
The causes of some mental disorders are easily identified. Malnutrition, for example, is still a prevalent cause of mental retardation in underdeveloped areas of the world. Likewise, infection, trauma, or acute poisoning from noxious chemicals can cause permanent brain damage. However, the majority of childhood and adolescent emotional disturbances have multiple, and much subtler origins, making diagnosis and treatment more challenging.
Nurturing Factors
Many theories describe the mix of biological and environmental factors (including nurturing influences) leading to emotional disturbances. Parenting style has an undeniably crucial influence on children's mental health and development. A relatively new theory now gaining wide acceptance looks at the fit between the parents' expectations and demands and the child's behavioral style.
Donald Wertlieb, associate professor at the Center for Applied Child Development at Tufts University, explains that "temperament is … the notion that each of us comes into the world with a constitutionally based behavioral style. For example, some people come in with upbeat, positive, steady moods and other people come in with fluctuating kinds of moods, what we often refer to as moodiness." According to Wertlieb, infants can be grouped into three temperament types:
the fairly easy; the slow to warm up (but once they
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