What We Focus on Grows

 

 

Domestic Violence and Child Development

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Domestic Violence can negatively affect the very chromosomes of your child.

Please go to this link on the Guardian Ad Litem website for important information on how your child's brain develops and how yelling, as well as physical violence in the home negatively affects the child while this is happening and the long term effects.

https://guardianadlitem.org/video-effects-exposure-domestic-violence-babies-children/

 

"Domestic Violence can feel scarier than War"

Read this article and watch the video about the effect of Domestic Violence.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/01/29/domestic-violence-research-children-abuse-mental-health-learning-aces/2227218002/

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Some Key take-aways from this article are:

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"Neuroscientist Tanja Jovanovic directs the Grady Trauma Project, a research institute based at Emory University in Atlanta. The risk of PTSD from domestic violence is high, she says, because it's a 'betrayal by someone who is supposed to be to a protector.' " 

Making matters worse, Jovanovic said, domestic violence often eliminates the 'buffering effect of another positive adult, 'because the adult who is targeted can't provide comfort to the children who witness it.' " 

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"Psychologist Abigail Gewirtz says domestic violence can feel scarier than war. Gewirtz is the director of the Institute of Translational Research in Children's Mental Health at the University of Minnesota. It's "one of the most terrifying forms of violence because it happens in a place which is supposed to be safe," she said. "Children are totally powerless, especially very young children. They are totally dependent on their parents.”

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"When parents in an abusive relationship separate, conditions for their children can become even riskier. The nonprofit group Center for Judicial Excellence, which monitors family courts, found that more than 650 children were killed by a parent in a "divorce, separation, custody, visitation, child support situation" from 2008 through 2018."