Impact of early experiences persists

Professor Bruce Perry is a man with a big brain and an abiding interest in the still-developing brains of young children.

Perry, an American expert in neuroscience and child psychiatry, also has a large social conscience.

He holds professorial positions in child psychiatry and neuroscience research at the Texas Children's Hospital in Houston and the Baylor College of Medicine.

But he is also the senior fellow of a national non-profit organisation set up to foster programmes providing research, training and service in the area of child maltreatment.

And he has long been an outspoken advocate of the involvement of policymakers in early-childhood issues.

Children are the most vulnerable members of the community, he says, and high standards of daycare, foster care, education and child-protection services should be a priority for any society interested in investing in valuable future citizens.

The trauma some of Perry's young patients have experienced often leaves no physical scars.

His research includes using new brain-imaging techniques which allow an understanding of how neural systems react when a child undergoes a traumatic experience.

A prime example came from Perry's work with the young survivors of the raid on the Branch Davidian cult complex in Waco that killed most of their parents.

Although they were outwardly calm and coping with the trauma, Perry's studies showed internal signs of stress gauged by monitoring high resting heart rates long after the event. He says this heightened response may have been stamped into the children's brains and can persist at a level below conscious awareness.

An extreme example it may be, but, the professor says, "it is increasingly clear that the experiences of childhood act as primary architects of the brain's capabilities throughout the rest of life.

"These organising childhood experiences can be consistent, nurturing, structured and enriched -- resulting in flexible, responsible, empathic, and intelligent contributors to society."

The flip-side, he says, is that "all too often, childhood experiences can be neglectful, chaotic, violent and abusive -- resulting in impulsive, aggressive, remorseless and intellectually impoverished members of society.

"One set of experiences," he says, "will produce taxpayers and one set of experiences will produce tax consumers."

And you do not even have to shake a child to damage its chances severely. To create what Perry has called "remorseless, impulsive, gun-toting punks," it is even easier than that: "You just neglect them early in life."

Perry will be addressing the international congress on this subject, on the challenge and opportunities of the first three years of life, on brain development and the effects of traumatic experience and neglect, and on physiological measurements in the assessment of maltreated children.

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