Consequences of Stress on Children's Development

Racism 

In 1957 I started first grade in Brooklyn, New York.  I remember being very afraid the first day of school. I had never been away from my family. And to top it off, it was on that first frightful day I discovered my first name.  My name was called several times and I just sat there not knowing that they were calling me, you see all of my young life I was called by my middle name because I was named after my aunt, and we lived in same the house my family did not want to confuse us .  They forgot to tell me before I went to school, but I survived the ordeal.  It all came together; I learned my name and everything else that was presented to me in school.   I was doing so well in second grade; I was top student in the Black and Hispanic neighborhood school, so I was one of the first to be bused to another school in an Italian and Irish area.  

My mother and father worked very hard to send us to school well groomed, and my grandmother kept our clothes starched and ironed.  My father worked at an upscale department store in Manhattan called Orbachs.  He was an elevator operator, and he was well liked and his co-workers always looked out for his daughters.  Orbachs supplied all of the soap operas’ wardrobes, and at the end of the season if the studio or actor didn’t want the clothes they went into the store’s thrift shop.  My father’s co-workers knew our sizes and would alert him of the item that would fit my sister and me.  As always we were well dressed and groomed first day of school Vaseline face and all.  We started this new school with a large group of white parents and children with signs, and yelling words as our school bus pulled up to the new school.  Now when I look back at that day I can’t remember hearing the angry words or the seeing the words on the signs.  I guess I blocked it out.  We were rushed from the bus to the classroom.   This is a nice school I remember thinking, but why is everyone so angry I said to myself?  I was raised in a strict southern Christian home, we had to be respectful to adults, that is all I knew and that’s why I was respectful no matter how mean they were to me. I had to struggle to keep up with my work. I was an A student in my old school, and my family was so very proud of me, I did not want to lose face.  This was a difficult task because this teacher did not look at me, or acknowledge my hand when it was raised- I was invisible to her.  When I came to school with dresses that my father bought from his job, Ms. Spellman my teacher would take me out of the classroom, and go and get other teachers in nearby classes, pull on my clothes and say “how do you think she got this”.  I felt so bad, but I just held my head high and cried inside.  I finally told my mother and grandmother, and my mother went to the school and spoke to the principal. In those days children were not a part of adult conversation, I never knew what was said, but I noticed the principal would visit my class every day.  I completed third grade with a B average, and continued to struggle through my elementary school life.  I graduated with honors thanks to my cousins and uncles who filled in the academic gaps for me.  I believe I can attribute my success to my well-grounded home life, and a big serving of self-esteem that were given to me in abundance by my family.

Racism still exists in Alabama, Mississippi, Boston, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island, NY where I live now.  Racism is like an invisible cloud that covers the world with fear.    People are too afraid to get to know each other because racism is grounded in lies and Pre-judged attitudes that have been passed down generationally.  We don’t have to travel too far, just look to your right and your left it’s there.  

My prayers go out to the children and the people of Rwanda.  The racism that killed over 500,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu countrymen by the militias Hutu known in Rwanda as interhamwe was unexplainable, unreasonable, unconscionable, and inhumane.   In early April of 1994, groups of ethnic Hutu, armed mostly with machetes, began a campaign of terror and bloodshed which embroiled the Central African country of Rwanda.  For approximately 100 days these Hutu attempted to exterminate their Central American brethren the Tutsi and moderate Hutu.  I cannot imagine the horror those children felt watching their families being murdered in front of their faces knowing the enemy could have been a neighbor.  Many of the children had to hide in fields to avoid their own death.  There were groups of children surviving alone because the adults were slaughtered. Once the 100 days passed, there was mass devastation the crops were destroyed, schools were leveled, and families no longer existed. Children wondered aimlessly wanted to make sense out of what was left of their lives.   “These children were faced with having to deal with feeding themselves, clothing themselves, whether they went to school or not and just determining their own future” said Lizanne McBride, the deputy director of programs for the international Rescue Committee in Rwanda.

Nshimyumkiza was nine years old during the 100 days of slaughter in which an estimated 800,00  of his Tutsi and moderate Hutu countrymen were butchered by militias-known as- interahamwe-as well as ordinary Rwandan  who had been whipped into a killing frenzy by the Rwanda’s hard-line Hutu administration.  Now he is twenty one unemployed out of school and admits that prospects for the future are grim. (Noel E. King ipcnews.net)

Some children were placed in orphan homes, but these homes could not afford to send them to school.  The Tutsi children lost their identity.   “Unicef reports estimate that 700,000 children – 18 percent of Rwanda’s 4.2 million children – still live in difficult circumstances.  “The family structure that used to support the child no longer exist” a 1998 report release by the group World Vision said.  Even after the killings began, many western governments sought to downplay the scope of the bloodshed.  “The level of trauma among children is unprecedented,” Chauvin said (www.nytimes.com) Children lost whole families, some boys put cloths over their head to be viewed as girls as not to be pulled out and killed.

Humanitarian organizations working in the region now report the Rwanda’s children have been the vulnerable to the poverty exploitation which followed the ethnic conflict.  The massacres have left several hundred thousand children either orphaned or separated from their parents.  “It is important to build schools and rehabilitate health centers and train people,” Chauvin said.  “Obviously that’s a very important- part of what we’ve done.  But I think that by keeping an eye on the importance of the trauma level of the children, one better understands what has happened to this country.

Racism exists on multiple levels around the world, but we should not be satisfied in accepting racism on any level here in the United States of America.

Child Development and Public Health

Immunizations

I personally have questions about the rate that immunizations (shots) are being issued.  Between 0 and two years old in 1969 children were getting one oral and one injection at six weeks old, but now a three week old baby is getting seven shots.  The mother’s colostrum (the liquid the new mother produces) has the God given ability to immunize the new born baby, and this form of immunization is not being promoted.  Money is the evil at the base of the immunization craze.  Case and point the drug companies are no longer pandering to the doctors they are now using mass media to do their pandering directly to the consumer. 

In 1983 my friend’s 3 month old daughter started having seizures after falling down the stairs in her mother’s arms.  Around that time I was watching 20/20 featuring pertussis seizures, and autism.  Shortly after viewing this segment my friend had an appointment for Diphtheria Pertussis Tetanus shot with her baby’s pediatrician not a clinic a doctor who was aware of her seizures. I told her to ask her doctor in-Lou of the fact her daughter was having seizures, and pertussis is known to sometimes cause autism or seizures, should she get the shot.  After my friend reminded him of this information the doctor said “oh no I’ll give her the Diphtheria Tetanus and exclude the Pertussis” What if the mom was not armed with this information.  Yes I had a waiver for my children for the immunization, and my youngest child who is now in college still has a waiver there is just too much controversy surrounding them, but I neither encourage nor speak negatively to my parents about the shots, but what I do say is investigate whatever you give your children.

   

By Neil Z. Miller
http://www.thinktwice.com/xpeditions/autism.htm

 Autism and the pertussis vaccine:
 The first cases of autism in the United States occurred at a time shortly after the pertussis vaccine became available. When the  pertussis vaccine was initially introduced (during the late 1930s), only the rich and educated parents who sought the very best  for their children, and who could afford a private doctor, were in a position to request the newest medical advancements.  (Remember how researchers were puzzled by the high incidence of autistic children being born into well-educated and "upper class" families.) However, by the 1960s and 1970s parents all over the country, within every educational and income level, were seeking help for their autistic children. Socioeconomic disparities began to disappear during this period. Today, autism is evenly distributed among all social classes and ethnic groups. (13) Once again this puzzled the researchers. Many simply concluded that earlier studies were flawed. But there is an explanation. Free vaccinations at public health clinics didn't yet exist in the 1940s and 1950s. Compulsory vaccination programs were still on the horizon. And as vaccine programs grew, parents from across the socioeconomic spectrum gained equal access to them. The growing number of children suffering from this new illness directly coincided with the growing popularity of the mandated vaccination programs during these same years. Autistic children were now being discovered within every kind of family, and in dreadfully greater numbers than ever before imagined. (14)

 The same correlations between autism and childhood vaccination programs may be found in other countries as well. In Japan, the first autistic child was diagnosed in 1945. (15) When the United States ended the war and occupied Japan, a mandatory vaccination program was established. Hundreds of new cases of autism were being diagnosed annually in Japanese children shortly thereafter.

As for the vaccines going to underdeveloped countries, well the drug companies that send them these drugs are charging the countries that are aiding the people of the world, these drugs are not free of charge, big money bigger business.  Yes because of unclean water, and unsanitary conditions we need to help, but let caution be our guide.

Smallpox vaccine 'triggered Aids virus'

London Times | MAY 11, 1987
PEARCE WRIGHT, SCIENCE EDITOR

The Aids epidemic may have been triggered by the mass vaccination campaign which eradicated smallpox. The World Health Organization, which masterminded the 13-year campaign, is studying new scientific evidence suggesting that immunization with the smallpox vaccine awakened the unsuspected, dormant human immune defense virus infection (HIV).

Some experts fear that in obliterating one disease, another disease was transformed from a minor endemic illness of the Third World into the current pandemic.

Childbirth--In Your Life and Around the World

The birth of my first son was in 1969 on Shaw Air Force Base, Sumter, S.C.  This was my first experience away from my very loving grandmother.  I found myself in a very cold and masculine military world, and I tried my best to cope with it.  My first husband actually gave me these instructions, “be strong and don’t embarrass me by making noise or screaming.”  In other words, the showing of my pain would make him look like less than a man.  My first and second trimesters were mild; it wasn’t until the 34^th week when I started clotting.  I was rushed to the hospital 6 times only to be told there was nothing wrong, because when I was examined they couldn’t find anything.  I told this southern general that I was dropping clots that looked like large pieces of liver, he said, "impossible".  My husband didn’t pick up the samples and take them in, and I was too afraid to pick them up.  Finally, in my 36^th week it happened again, but this time when Dr. Stafford examined me, a look of astonishment covered his face as he frantically tore the gloves off  and called for emergency surgery. As they were putting me under the anesthesia, I heard the words placenta previa.   When I finally came to, I asked what I had delivered, and the nurse said a boy As I felt bandages on my stomach. I asked if I had a c section, the answer was yes.   I felt less than a person, I was just a non-commissioned military wife and I felt expendable.   That experience left me feeling less than human. I was trapped between a husband and the military.  With all of the physical pain I was in, I was expected to show some type of strength by being quiet.  I chose this example because the mother is an important factor in the birthing process, and I was left out of this process. My baby and I could have died due to my exclusion in the process of giving birth. I believe that bonding between the mother and child starts at the  prenatal stage.  Talking, and playing music to the baby in utero, as well as eating well play a significant role in the bonding process.  The love that a mother gives to her new born helps the development of the baby.    Because of the lack of support I received at the time of my son’s birth, I give my son the attention I was missing from his father and the doctor.  My son and I to date are very close, and believe it was the bond that was created at birth.

According to Carroll Dunham,  author  of Mamatoto: A Celebration of Birth in many countries in Africa, and Asia,  at the last stages of pregnancy the expected mother is taken to her family to be pampered and cared for.  This was a surprise because that is exactly what my grandmother did for her daughters.  They came to our house about a week before delivery, and they were treated royally.  After the baby was born they came to our house, and their husbands visited them and sometimes stayed there, but my aunts didn’t have to do anything except hold and feed her baby.  This was a wonderful two week experience for all.  After those two weeks she was given back to her husband, but when he went to work we went over to their home to continue to assist her every week.    

My grandmother was born in 1900, and her grandmother was a slave I do believe that many of my family’s practices were passed down from our mother country Africa through verbal translation.