The Brain Architects: Toxic Stress


  • March 5, 2020
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   early-learning
The Brain Architects podcast

Toxic stress is something advocates speak a lot about these days. 

This episode of "The Brain Architects" is a great deep-dive into what toxic stress is, how it impacts children, how those impacts linger into adulthood and how we can help parents buffer themselves and their children from those impacts. The podcast is produced by The center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

Here are some of the highlights of the discussion:

Dr. Jack Shankoff says every time he speaks about toxic stress, people in the audience come up to him to share their stories. That often comes in two forms, he says — people worried about the damage that may have been done to themselves or their children, and people who are relieved to have a name to put to the trauma they have experienced and the impacts that trauma has had on their lives. 


Shankoff stresses that the brain is always trying to make things right in itself. “It’s never too late to make things better.”

Cerella Craig, a community mental health worker, speaks about the cycle of mistrust and disappointment that can keep parents who most need help from getting it. “Neglect from systems that have failed to serve these moms, what I see is s lack of trust, a lack of belief that there’s the ability to help.

Jennette Vega, training director for Rise Magazine, reinforced what Craig says she sees, especially in parents who are part of the child welfare system. Feeling overwhelmed by, say, the number of appointments or tasks they have been given to do in a week, sometimes parents just shut down.

She also cautions about how the concept of toxic stress is discussed. “At Rise, we’ve been working into getting knowledgeable about toxic stress. I ran that statement science tells us that healthy brain architecture depends on genes and environment by my parents’ staff this week, and a parent says it just sounds like scientists are saying that if you are a person of color—referring to the genes—and if you live in low-income communities—referring to the environments—that your family members are just screwed and you will get toxic stress.”

Pediatrician Kathleen Conroy: And that is a critical piece of the conversation, Conroy says. “Because what we know is that many, many parents are parenting really well despite facing significant adversity–they’re modeling building relationships, they’re modeling emotional self-regulation under difficult circumstances. And I think we need to remind parents that when they are showing those amazing skills to their children and when they’re portraying as much love and consistency as they can under difficult circumstances, that’s actually building their children’s life skills... They’re actually giving their child something…. If we’re talking about things being determinative, we are going to lose our audience for this message and we’re going to be very incorrect.”

Researcher Megan Gunner spoke about the need to make sure that when we talk about the science behind the impact of toxic stress, we keep this in mind: “The problem is the complexity of this and trying to get the message weighted appropriately so that we acknowledge the fact that there are inequities in our society and those inequities are increasing the risk of harm to our kids and to our future society, while not, at the same time, going deterministic.”


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