I receive a newsletter from the Northwest Neurodevelopmental Training Center in Woodburn, Oregon. I know several parents who have seen very positive outcomes for their special needs children by using the neurodevelopmental reorganization approaches employed there.
This month’s main article caught my eye because it spoke to so many issues faced by families of children with neuropsychiatric disorders. First the intro to the newsletter cited a February 2007 study that says the incidence of three neuropsychiatric disorders – autism, Tourettes and hyperkinetic disorder – were on the rise in children. The main article focused on the impact of chronic stress not only on children’s emotional and psychological health, but on the health of the whole family.
As I’ve blogged about before, infant and toddler brain structure is actual changed by chronic stress. (Check out this fascinating article by Dianne Maroney, an RN and owner of the Premature Infant website.) This is what makes children who are abused or neglected especially vulnerable to not only emotional disorders, but learning disorders and memory problems as well.
But there’s more bad news. This article went on to cite the physical ailments that chronically stressed children endure. Much of this is related to suppressed immune system. Some studies find that children exposed to chronic stress are sick more, and that stress has been found to decrease the effectiveness of vaccines. I have to interject personal experience, though, and the experiences I hear from several parents of post-institutionalized (PI) kids. Many report, as I did in the early years, that our children NEVER get sick. Except for a recurring ear infection, LuLu never caught the colds, the strep throat, the latest bug. She never, ever ran a fever. Now, through the biomedical interventions and healing we’ve done to her system, I realize that she was likely impacted by every bug. But her immune system was too weak to respond…no fevers, no typical symptoms, but changes in behavior (indicating changes in biochemistry) that no one connected to the illnesses.
So while we’re pouring our hearts, souls and entire family resources into helping our chronically stressed special needs children, something else is likely happening too – we parents are being negatively affected by chronic stress. The stress of parenting a traumatized child, or a child with a neurological disability, is immense. The physical health risks include rises in blood pressure, increase risk of heart disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and loss of brain function ourselves.
A study out of the University of California, San Francisco showed that the stress of caring for our special needs children (the children of the mothers in this study had autism or cerebral palsy) caused the mothers to age, from a genetic standpoint, anywhere from nine to seventeen years older than their chronological age. YIKES! I’m feeling particularly old now!
And continued stress as a person ages leads to actual shrinkage of the brain and has been linked to Alzheimer’s Disease. Not a rosy picture.
The folks at NNTC present all this information to encourage families living with chronic stress to look at interventions for all family members, and not just the child with the diagnosed disorder. Physical illnesses, depression, premature aging and general negative health impacts affect all the family members who live in household of chronic stress.
I urge you to check out neurodevelopmental reorganization and NNTC.
Here’s an awesome website put together by some very knowledgable adoptive moms, many of whom have found neurodevelopmental reorganization to be a helpful intervention.