Here at the Kids First Center, an agency whose mission is to lessen the negative impact of divorce and parental separation on kids, we talk with parents every day who are dealing with one of the most stressful life events they will ever encounter. They worry about how they’ll get through the next week, month or year, and they worry about the long-term effects of their decisions on the kids.
What do we tell parents? Keep your kids out of the middle and away from prolonged conflict. It’s not divorce or separation that harms kids as much as the toxic stress of living with years of negativity and discord between parents who aren’t co-parenting effectively. And now, recent scientific discoveries are reinforcing just how damaging chronic exposure to stress hormones early in life can be.
Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor are now studying exactly how stress incites inflammation in the body and, in turn, disease.
A comprehensive study conducted in the late 1990s proved the relationship between chronic stress early in life and health problems in adulthood associated with inflammation and immune dysfunction.
[For more of this story, written by Mary Swann, go to http://www.centralmaine.com/20...ically-damages-kids/]
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