An ACE Up Your Sleeve

• Physical – spanking with an object like a belt, hitting, kicking, etc.
• Verbal – “How could you be so stupid?”
• Sexual – only contact sexual abuse was counted

2 types of neglect:

• Physical – unclean, under fed/hungry
• Emotional – unloved, unwanted

5 types of adverse events:            

• Domestic violence between parents            
• A family member who has an addiction (alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc.) 
  
• A family member who is chronically ill (mental, physical, suicidal, etc.)           
  
• A family member in prison
  
• Not growing up in a house with two parents – divorce or death  

Each type of event counts as 1 point. It does not matter whether physical abuse happened once or a hundred times. If it happened, you get a score of 1. Respondents could have an ACE score ranging from 0 to 10. Here is a link where you can calculate your ACE score.  

There were some startling results from this survey. The first was only 30% of people had a score of zero. That really surprised the researchers. Nobody had ever thought to ask about or study Adverse Childhood Events before in relation to physical health risks and problems.  

If you have a score of 4, you are 4600 times more likely than a person with a score of zero to have attempted suicide. And the really sobering one – if you have a score of 6, your life expectancy is 20 years less than the general population.  

The researchers came up with the ACE pyramid to try to explain what was happening (see photo). An Adverse Childhood Event occurs, and disrupts the child’s neurodevelopment. Then the child experiences social and emotional problems, which lead to maladaptive coping strategies when they hit adolescence. That leads to disease, and eventually early death for about 16% of the population.  

A study out of Stanford assigned ACE scores to 700 children at the Bayview Hunters Point Clinic. They discovered that children with a score of 4 were 30 times more likely to have a learning or behavior disorder! Previously, we had presumed those were inherited.     

In 2009, a brain imaging study by Victor Carrion, MD at Stanford made international headlines when it definitively proved that trauma changes the shape of a young child’s growing brain. The hippocampus is smaller, and does not function as well, leading to poorer memory, among other things.  

All this is an alarming message for parents. It is vitally important that you try to make sure your child has as calm and peaceful a childhood as possible, and especially in the first five years while the brain is developing very rapidly. Traumatic events literally rewire a child’s brain.  

It is vitally important that parents consider how they are disciplining their children. Most parents would never want to do anything to increase their child’s risk of early death. Many of us grew up in a time when parents often threatened and used corporal punishment. We were raised to think spanking or whipping a child was essential to building good character.  

While we strive to raise responsible children, inflicting the kind of punishment many of us received, would definitely be an Adverse Childhood Event, putting our children at heightened risk of physical illness and early death. Thinking that delivering a good, sound spanking is exactly what the child needs and doing it, is actually increasing their risk of a host of negative consequences.  

It turns out mothers who spank their toddlers are most likely to be spanking them 3 times a week. Spanked children are the school yard bullies. Teens who have been spanked are at much greater risk of using drugs/alcohol, coercing their partners into sex, having risky sex (no condoms), and engaging in sado-masochistic sex (for example, using spanking as form of sexual arousal).  

Worse, those spanked toddlers have lower IQs – up to 5 points! A study of 700 low birth weight preschoolers found those that had the harshest discipline (corporal punishment) had the lowest IQ scores. Interestingly enough, countries with the least amounts of corporal punishment have the highest IQ scores.  

You may believe that spanking is a necessary evil. You might be a parent who never spanked your child in anger, never used anything except your open hand on the buttocks and never left a mark that lasted more than 24 hours (the only kind of spanking that is legal in California). You might feel you can spank your kid properly and not contribute to their ACE score.

But a number of parents will use America’s lack of a law banning corporal punishment/assault on children to commit horrific assaults on the weakest, most vulnerable members of our society. And a number of them will kill their children, perhaps accidentally, but it does not matter to the child who is dead.  

In Sweden, they had a pretty high child abuse death rate when they enacted a ban on spanking in 1979. Guess how many children died from child abuse and neglect in Sweden last year? Zero. Now guess how many died here in America? Four or five children died every single day of child abuse and neglect in the US in 2011. Those are shameful statistics.  

These statistics need to make even the most ardent advocates of spanking sit up and take notice. If the US made assault on its children (i.e. corporal punishment) illegal, we might save the lives of four or more children per day. And we would all live a lot longer, healthier lives. The decrease in money spent on health care later in life might be staggering and revolutionize the medical industry.

Even those who think that spanking is okay should be willing to consider giving it up in an effort to save the lives of children who will die from assault by parents wanting to “teach them a lesson they won’t soon forget”. The American Academy of Pediatrics says spanking is “the least effective way to discipline”.  

Hitting an adult is a crime called assault, and punishable by jail. Hitting animals is illegal. Why is hitting our children okay? The answer – it is not. Corporal punishment is an Adverse Childhood Event (ACE). ACEs lead to chronic disease and disability in adults. Our society cannot afford the medical costs that ACEs cause. The sooner we liberate ourselves from blind acceptance of “spare the rod, spoil the child”, the longer, more high quality, disease-free lives we will live. And the more healthy our society will become.
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To see an 8 min. YouTube video of Dr. Vince Felitti talking about the ACE study, click here.    

To see a 1.5 hr YouTube video of Dr. Vince Felitti talking about the ACE study, click here.  
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IF YOU HAVE A REALLY HIGH ACE SCORE, please do not despair. There are no really large scale studies like this one which document the effectiveness of counseling interventions, but we know, based on smaller studies that they do help mitigate the effects of Adverse Childhood Events. For more information about your ACE score and resiliency factors, please see this link. http://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/