Philadelphia Inquirer Alfred Lubrano's story appeared on Philly.com earlier this month. By focusing mostly on harsh 
parenting among the poor (there was one sentence indicating that harsh parenting occurs among middle-class parents), and showing only black faces in photographs (the photo that accompanied the story was of a Zimbabwean woman begging on the streets of Harare...totally out of context), journalists miss the larger story about adverse childhood experiences among whites and other ethnicities, and among the middle and upper-middle class, as the CDC's original ACE Study and subsequent ACE surveys in 21 states and several countries have shown. There's absolutely no doubt that ACEs exist in an environment of poverty, but isn't poverty the result of ACEs and systems that are not trauma-informed, not the cause? Also, the story would have been more solution-oriented if it had included programs that are addressing ACEs in Philadelphia.
Harsh parenting unleashes so-called toxic stress in children, researchers say, changing the structure and functionality of their brains, heightening chances for negative behavior, and potentially condemning a child to a life hampered by heart disease, among other maladies.
"This is an incredibly important public-health issue," said Joan Luby, professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. After studying 145 children over 12 years, she authored an article about the effect of poverty on children's brains in the journal JAMA Pediatrics in October.
Think of harsh parenting as an agent as destructive as lead poisoning, said Daniel Taylor, a pediatrician at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in North Philadelphia.
Such parenting, often involving "quick 'do-as-I-say' orders from Mom or Dad without the buffering effect of a loving, supportive attitude," causes the release in children of stress hormones such as cortisol that are toxic to developing brains, Taylor said.
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