When the fidgety, anxious, 5-year-old boy from northern Michigan came in about a year ago to see pediatrician Tina Hahn, it was soon apparent to her this was a case medication alone would not solve.
“He was trying to hide under the chair. He looked panicked and overwhelmed. He was in that fight or flight mode,” said Hahn, who was then in practice in Alpena.
The boy, she learned, had been taken away from his mother when he was 3, from a home rife with drug use, alcoholism and severe physical and emotional abuse. The mom later died and, eventually, so did the grandfather who adopted the child out of foster care.
This terrified boy crouching under the chair was, to put it mildly, a poster child for the kind of risk factors that can dim the odds of growing into a healthy, capable adult. Adding up the trauma of the boy’s brief, chaotic life, the pediatrician calculated a score of 6 on a 10-point scale of Adverse Childhood Experiences – factors closely linked to such children’s future physical and emotional health.
The higher the score, the worse the likely outcome.
For more information on this article by Ted Roelofs in Bridge Magazine, please see the following link.
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