How household instability as a child made your brain more efficient….and how that can be a problem for you today

Sunday July 2, 2023. I booked a train to Fredericksburg Virginia later this week to visit my son Dan, and my grandkids Mika, 22, and Cobie, 21. Mika wants to a therapist.

Developmental cognitive neuroscience has accumulated a sh*tload of knowledge about Developmental Trauma.

Nowadays we have richly detailed info on how the body reacts to stress. For example, we now understand that only a limited number of physiologic variables, such as pH, body temperature, glucose levels and oxygen tension, must remain in homeostasis, (i.e., within set and narrow, prescribed limits).

In contrast, there is much in our physiology that can achieve allostasis, i.e., doing what’s required to shift to a new, more stressful state.

• This means that the things that happen in our lives can change our bodily systems and how they function. Holy sh*t!

What is allostasis?

Allostasis is what happens when you efficient regulate resources such as insulin, Oxygen, etc. You’re doing this because you facing a threatening situation that requires you to change your state efficiently.

So…and this is the rub, as opposed to homeostasis, in which the goal is remain a steady state of groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon.

• New research by Felicia Hardi explains how the allostasis created by household instability, especially before the age of 5, increases the risk of the depression manifesting by the age 21.

What makes this research so distinct from earlier efforts, is that this brand, spankin’ new research links childhood instability with profoundly adverse outcomes.

In other words, the research team was able to describe how household instability can shape a child’s brain.

How allostasis increases efficiency… and why that fu*king sucks!

These researchers described how allostasis, created within a little child’s brains as an adaptation to perceived instability in the FOO, renders said kiddo as profoundly more vulnerable to depression and interpersonal dysregulation in adulthood.

In other words, members of the lucky sperm club, (happy, loving, uneventful childhoods), have consequential brain development conducive to not only childhood, but also future adult emotional stability.

The notion that allostasis is some kind of a blessing that comes with collateral damage is not a fresh, or novel insight…

The Developmental Model, (among other developmental models), of couples therapy posits that stress-induced adaptations—such as an increased pace of development early in life-might be helpful in the short-run.

But… we now are more keenly aware of some sh*tty long-term health consequences.

Allostatic load refers to the wear-and-tear on the body/mind that results from the need to achieve allostasis in an ongoing, serial fashion.

The body pursues this Holy Grail; a new state of being that’s better than mal-adapting to stress… but even if you get there… it is not a fu*king freebie.

So, what actually changes when children experience household instability early in life?

The brain’s structural network efficiency. That is, the structural networks of adolescents who had undergone early household instability were more far efficient than the fortunate few who are incubated in a cocoon of endearment.

At first blush, that sounds pretty cool! who doesn’t want a more efficient brain?

Here’s the sh*tty part. Early maturation of neural structures solidifies connections in ways that limit opportunities for subsequent development. In other words, we feel like we’re always better staying safe, than taking risks for deeper intimacy. This intimacy sh*t is too tricky... best leave it be.

It’s like cauterizing a wound when that’s all you can do in battlefield triage, Shifts happen. Congrats mom and dad…We’re now lightening fast at the creation of unhelpful, distorted thoughts.

Here’s the tragic downside. According to the research, an excess of early household instability potentially increasing susceptibility to psychopathology (stinkin’ thinkin’). yeah, I know.. WTF?

The research reveals a significantly greater global efficiency …as measured from dMRI data obtained in adolescence is related to increased depressive (but not anxious) symptoms during the threshold of adulthood.

It’s one of those adaptations that carries a heavy developmental cost. Couples therapists need to take a hard squint at this research.

It’s not our first rodeo with this kind of data. Other recent research has also documented specific brain-level adaptations;especially to inconsistent mothering, in the short run… but Hardi and her crew were the first to document specific, detrimental, long-running brain changes.

Their longitudinal, 2 decade study of the child’s environment likely captured the accumulation of wear and tear of stress resulting from unstable families of origin, day after day, year after year…

How is childhood household instability defined for the purpose of this research?

Unfortunately, the study cast a broad net. I would have preferred a more narrow focus… but here is what they found:

Sh*t happen to lots of kids. But here’s the sh*t that really matters: residential moves, changes in household composition (people moving in or out of the child’s family of origin) at any age, and essential caregiver transitions which occur during the kiddo’s first 5 crucial years.

As a community of practice, we can help establish cultural norms to call attention to their significance, and hopefully minimize the frequency and magnitude of these events in the lives of our children.

A few of the children in this study experienced all of this sh*t more than once

Most experienced some kind of household instability, and the researchers tested whether the degree of instability was a significant variable.

The reason this study is important for couples therapists is that this research was able to confirm that other influential stressors (e.g., harsh parenting, neglect, food insecurity, sexual abuse, etc.) have highly specific, unique neural correlates for future adult mental health.

That means that other stressors matter, but family of origin (FOO) instability is qualitatively different:

It changes developing brains in quite distinct ways.

Demonstrating that different stressors affect growing children’s brains in different ways is important for underlining a more basic truth…what happens to people changes them. This is why the notion of agape is so critical. Our survival as a species depends upon it. We need to have each others back.

Final thoughts on household instability and human development

I’m kinda fed up with the post-modern bullsh*t that almost all of our reality is social construction, i.e., that events have the meaning that we are socialized to assign to them, (or the meaning that we collective attribute to them, which we then internalize).

On the other hand, we clearly accept the reality that when “shit happens” …it can also result in important, overwhelming biological consequences.

I think the tension becomes apparent when work like Hardi’s links childhood trauma to a developmental bias…a detectable global network efficiency, emerging in the teen years… which is reliably predictive of future adult depression, cognitive distortion, and emotional dysregulation..

Is it plausible that growing children adapt to household instability with accelerated brain maturation because that is what our culture expects them to do?

In other words, is “A Boy Named Sue” a valid case history?

Or are these researchers barking up the wrong tree?

What if the adult emotional dysregulation and depression associated with accelerated brain maturation is adaptive behavior?

Ok you caught me.. my therapeutic bias …I believe household instability is bad for kids, and I’m not surprised that neuroscience can show us how too much household instability changes our little brains for the worse in adulthood.

Perhaps the most productive use for this data is for thought leaders to create interventions that promote household stability, particularly during early childhood.

A loving family of origin (FOO) fosters long-term development of our little kiddo’s health and well-being.

But sadly, It’s nearly fu*king impossible to design interventions that will reduce residential moves, family of origin membership changes, and/or essential caregiver changes.

But this sh*t matters… and that’s what couples and family therapists need to know.

Still, I think that if we recognize that this kind of family of origin (FOO) instability is inherently critical to curtail—rather than assuming that the significance of these experiences is somehow “socially constructed”—we’ll be taking better care of our kids.

Be well, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Hardi, Felicia & Goetschius, Leigh & Tillem, Scott & McLoyd, Vonnie & Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne & Boone, Montana & Lopez-Duran, Nestor & Mitchell, Colter & Hyde, Luke & Monk, Christopher. (2023). Early childhood household instability, adolescent structural neural network architecture, and young adulthood depression: A 21-year longitudinal study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 61. 101253. 10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101253.