April 4, 2000
Contact: Roger Martin, Research and Public Service, (785) 864-7239. Columnist Roger Martin writes about research at KU for Kansas media and in a webzine at www.research.ku.edu/explore/.
The writer's tone was so casual she might have been speaking of the weather:
"My dad had this nice habit of hitting us in the back of the head with the butt of his palm at the dinner table. I'd be eating in silence, then he'd get up and bop me one for no reason. Then he'd sit down like nothing happened."
The words made me think of some research I'd heard about.
An electrode was threaded into the fear region of a rat's brain. On day one, a shock was delivered. Nothing happened. For several days, the shocks continued. Then, around day eight, the shocked rat had a seizure. And every day from then on, a shock would induce seizure.
This gradual sensitizing is called kindling, says Tom Pazdernik, a professor of pharmacology at the KU Medical Center. Hearing about it made me wonder how many blows to a child's head are required to "kindle" that child. And how does a kindled child act?
To find out, I called Marion O'Brien, who heads the KU Child and Family Research Center. She told me about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Some kids who are hit without warning in their early years don't shudder with seizures.
Instead, they clam up.
They hold back from mixing with other kids, startle easily, tense.
So I asked the woman whose father hit her whether she thought she had PTSD.
"Gee," she asked, "do I act like I'm shell-shocked?"
The question was logical. War veterans also sometimes suffer PTSD.
I said, "Well, I've heard that PTSD folks tend to hold back, and you do seem that way--at least a little."
I feared putting her on the spot, so I changed the subject. I asked how angry she was at her mother for letting her father whack her.
Less angry, she said, than she'd been at her mother after the family lost its home. She and her siblings then went to live with grandpa, a drunk. He would sometimes sit, wasted, by the bed that she and her sister shared in the living room, yelling at them, denying them sleep. Then he'd stumble off to his own room. He'd yell from there, sometimes about the worthlessness of their mother, who'd taken flight altogether.
"My grandfather," she said, "made me appreciate what a good father my dad had been."
I asked who knew about her story. Her boyfriend knows the most, she said. Some others know bits and pieces.
That's so few, I thought. O'Brien's words came back: "A child with PTSD would be somewhat isolated, socially."
Spare the rod and spoil the child, I used to hear. Yet both psychological and neurobiological research suggest the need for gentle connection of parent and child. Hold, stroke, coo: children treated that way grow up with more robust bodies, bigger brains, better coping skills.
Pazdernik said, "If you remove newborn mouse pups from their mother and isolate them in the first days of life, when you expose those mice to brain-damaging stimuli, they're much more prone to brain injury than are mice who have plenty of connection with the mother."
And what happens if, out of the clear blue, you whack a kid upside the head? Not much research on that one. So let's admit into evidence a survivor's testimony:
"Sometimes," the woman said, "I'm prone to a bit of violence."
I thought, "By what miracle of the human spirit is your rage so small?"