I remember having it drilled into me in High School that unless you did well on your finals:
1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted.
2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career.
3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.
Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
NewJazz•Aug 21, 2026
I remember having it drilled into me in high school that I was procrastinating school work while at my mom's to avoid spending time with my dad and I was faking my sobbing for sympathy and I was a horrible person who was lucky to have a dad as good as I had and how I keep doing the same things wrong and I am a smartass prick who doesn't care about anyone but myself.
12-14 was rough.
School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
squigz•Aug 21, 2026
This is what I think of when I think of "early life stress" in kids - not worrying about school.
mrguyorama•Aug 21, 2026
It's called "Adverse Childhood Experiences", or ACEs, and the field of psychology has found them to be extremely good predictors of future negative outcomes for a long time now.
Things like abuse, neglect, natural disasters, basically anything that can cause trauma or significant stress.
Be a toddler and your mom's new boyfriend abuses both of you? Congrats, you brain has developed in a way that will not be conducive at all to your future, because instead of developing a functional reward system, you've developed a specific hyperawareness to manage the difficulty of living around one kind of abuser. This incredibly specific adaptation will of course, not prevent you from being an easy target for an entirely different type of abuser in high school.
(It's actually not that simple of course. Multiple ACEs are predictive of future troubles, not just one, so it's more like "A child who lives in an environment of constant stress, fear, and pain is likely to have a brain that didn't develop well" with a direction of effect unstated)
This is one reason why things like abuse and poverty are so damn cyclical. Your parents grew up in poverty and with abusive parents, so they have an elevated chance to abuse their children, and on and on and on.
This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids, and in the US, it also eliminates the horrific humiliation machine we've built around paying for school lunch, which might not be the best way to raise kids anyway.
mjevans•Aug 22, 2026
It takes a village is so true. Children are something society as a whole should invest in, and fails to do so at risk to it's own future.
By society, I mean every one of us that plans to grow old instead of an early death.
Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three or ideally more generations of well adjusted people that grew up not fearful of hunger, nor lack of basic shelter, medical care?
Also, providing quality child care for any time the parent(s) are working frees up quality workers to do that... though a better work life balance would also help society.
exe34•Aug 22, 2026
This reminds me of my father. I used to play a game: the moment I hear something crashing or I hear him swearing, I try to guess how he was going to pin that on me. I got pretty good at that game! As an adult though, I've had several people tell me to stop apologising for existing.
golly_ned•Aug 21, 2026
I don't think that's what they mean by 'early-life'.
astura•Aug 22, 2026
...Or 'stress' for that matter.
leoh•Aug 21, 2026
I remember having this in middle school, it was a nightmare and majorly fucked me up
syllogism•Aug 21, 2026
The optimal amount of stress about that stuff is not zero, and most teenagers are going to be desperately biased towards "none of this matters, just peermax".
AngryData•Aug 22, 2026
Couldn't some of that because of how people act like EVERYTHING is the most important thing for kids to do, irregardless of how it actually stacks up, and some develop something akin to alarm fatigue and stop listening?
Plus almost everyone can get into a college, there is only really competition for a handful of elite schools. My college wanted SAT scores for admission, I did not take the SAT, they still admitted me without question. As long as you don't fail out your first two semesters in a row most colleges don't give two craps about your highschool performance.
coldtea•Aug 21, 2026
The healthy reaction for 16-18 years old is to not give a damn about that, rebel, and discover the other (or the same) sex and partying.
euroderf•Aug 21, 2026
Not to mention having all this on your permanent record.
InterviewFrog•Aug 22, 2026
Alexander the Great won his first battle at the age of 18.
Treating 16 to 18 year old like 5 year olds is not the right way to go about it.
asphodele•Aug 22, 2026
Sitting Bull killed his first buffalo with bow and arrow from horseback at the age of 10.
danparsonson•Aug 22, 2026
Not exactly a representative example you picked there though
Noaidi•Aug 22, 2026
Alexander the Great died when he was 33.
porridgeraisin•Aug 22, 2026
Is it wrong?
wiseowise•Aug 22, 2026
There are many things in life that are “not wrong”, doesn’t mean you have to scar kids for life with this shit.
basisword•Aug 22, 2026
"You need to do well in your exams because they're important for your future" is not 'scarring' kids.
basisword•Aug 22, 2026
Exam pressure isn't the kind of stress they're talking about.
>> More than half of the world’s children are exposed to early-life stress from abuse, household dysfunction such as violence or drug use, or other traumatic experiences
slfnflctd•Aug 22, 2026
I was utterly convinced at age 14 that I had ruined my life and any chance of a good career. I also was pretty sure the world was going to end soon. I started smoking cigarettes and experimenting with various risky behaviors. A few years later, I became suicidal for a time.
It wasn't until my late 20s that I started living a more 'normal' life, but by then I was a decade behind in career development and other things.
Academic concerns may not by themselves count as trauma, but combined with other factors they can be the thing that pushes someone into total hopelessness.
Noaidi•Aug 22, 2026
Just FYI, that type of stress is typically not included as a form of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). That does not mean I think it does not matter. It does, and more so for kids with poor diets.
My childhood ACE's: Woke up on an operating table when I was three, mother and brother attempted suicide, Mother with schizoaffective disorder, physical abuse by my brothers, psychological torture by my brother (he forced me to watch him burn a nest full of baby birds with a blow torch).
madaxe_again•Aug 22, 2026
I remember being sodomised by the geography master at primary school, and being beaten by masters almost daily. They’d withhold food and sleep from us as punishment. I wouldn’t see my parents for three months at a time. You had to exist with eyes in the back of your head.
But shit man, yeah, exams.
nemosaltat•Aug 21, 2026
When our Little, Stuart falls down we don’t even know what he remembers. [in mice]
ls612•Aug 21, 2026
In mice.
leoh•Aug 21, 2026
"In mice" is the right caveat for outcomes and the wrong one for mechanisms. Nobody’s selling you a drug here--they’re describing a chromatin change, and that’s the part rodents are actually good for.
The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.
dang•Aug 21, 2026
Inmiced above.
LightBug1•Aug 22, 2026
Are you a man or a mouse?
jdw64•Aug 21, 2026
Then my brain must be full of scars.
sph•Aug 21, 2026
These pop-sci articles annoy me greatly. All I can think reading the title is “well, duh?” - they’re a complete tautology.
Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.
If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.
This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”
hamper653•Aug 21, 2026
> Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it.
That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.
oharapj•Aug 22, 2026
It also doesn’t need to be a scar.. much easier to explain things as obvious post hoc than to predict them I fear
mattmcknight•Aug 22, 2026
Scar is also a very loaded word to use here for something that is not a scar.
T-A•Aug 22, 2026
> if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it
Yes, and it (or at least one of them) has now been found. Maybe you don't care about knowledge for its own sake, but as the "irritating" press release goes on to point out,
“There are currently no treatments for what early-life stress does to the brain, partially because we have not had a clear picture of what molecular mechanisms to target,” Peña said. “This work is exciting because it reveals a clear mechanism, and also helps explain why the impact of stress is both latent and broad.
Byte-Naut•Aug 22, 2026
We do all know experience has its substrate, but one thing matters more—are they encoded as stubborn neural connections, mitochondrial damage, epigenetic marks, or something else to transform it into depression, long-term inflammation, or stress susceptibility, etc.? The current evidence emphasizes epigenetics. Only if we know what the 'it' is, do we have chance to change, rather than just knowing it exists.
neuralkoi•Aug 22, 2026
This article talks about a finding related to SETD7. This has implications for new treatments.
Noaidi•Aug 22, 2026
Yes. Any gene that is methylated can be demethylated. This is actually great news.
anigbrowl•Aug 22, 2026
Not to play down anyone's stressful life experiences, but the sort of stress they're talking about in this article is more typically correlated with stressors like violence, hunger, or institutionalization in the first decade of life.
genxy•Aug 22, 2026
So millions of kids in Gaza. :(
nhuser2221•Aug 22, 2026
Thousands of millions they seem pretty happy now
bilbo0s•Aug 22, 2026
Well, to be fair, that's also hundreds of thousands of impoverished kids in in the US as well. (In fact, sometimes the kids don't even need to be impoverished for the mom to fail to feed them and beat them silly every night.)
Also hundreds of thousands of kids throughout parts of Central and South America.
And then of course, there are the millions throughout Africa.
Don't even get me started on all the future Iranian soldiers we're "training" right now.
And on and on and on.
Point being, a world where children are not made to suffer is a world that can't exist as long as humans are humans. Because adults, from the time before time, have made victims of kids.
I'm not sure it's able to be stopped? It seems part of the human condition.
estearum•Aug 22, 2026
> I'm not sure it's able to be stopped? It seems part of the human condition.
Yet somehow there are many places in which it has pretty much stopped?
squigz•Aug 22, 2026
> Point being, a world where children are not made to suffer is a world that can't exist as long as humans are humans.
> I'm not sure it's able to be stopped? It seems part of the human condition.
The most important part of human nature/the human condition is our ability - or perhaps even need - to reflect and grow and change. It happens slowly, but it inevitably happens.
Any way though, I'm not really sure what your point is. That we shouldn't care or try to stop it because it's "part of the human condition"? That we must care about all these injustices equally? That if we can't address all these injustices equally, we mustn't address any?
bilbo0s•Aug 22, 2026
> Point being, a world where children are not made to suffer is a world that can't exist as long as humans are humans.
And,
Any way though, I'm not really sure what your point is.
You quoted the part where I said what my point was?
genxy•Aug 22, 2026
It wasn't an _only_, but I have long thought that if humanity loved itself. It would really try to make sure that every single child on the planet was cared for, loved and educated. That they felt safe when they went to bed and had a meal when they woke up.
This isn't a means problem, it is a will problem.
soulofmischief•Aug 22, 2026
Great, I had all three of those in large helpings. :)
thibaut_barrere•Aug 22, 2026
I do not read this in the article, I was more understanding that half the kids of the world could be concerned to a level or another, can you quote?
rho138•Aug 22, 2026
So just 7.2 million households in the US. Minimize the marginalized more daddy.
Surely the level of stress needed to have this impact is something that needs to be studied. The researchers presumably went to an extreme to ensure a clear signal for a result, but the fact they've shown there is a significant outcome the next step is to work out how much stress is needed to cause a long term problem.
You can't just dismiss the result because you think it's unlikely to be something that affects a lot of people.
There is a theory in transactional analysis therapy that states adult addiction (in all its forms) pretty much always stems from childhood trauma...
anigbrowl•Aug 22, 2026
Where did you get the idea that I was dismissing the result?
Noaidi•Aug 22, 2026
Not a scar IMHO, but a wound that can be healed. SETD7 is a Histone Methyltransferase. Meaning it attaches methyl groups to DNA which turns genes off. But there are enzymes that remove these methyl groups as well and they are called Demethylases [1]. Many of these enzymes can be stimulated by their nutritional cofactors which are things like Zinc, Iron, and Riboflavin.
I am a product of early life trauma. Knowing these thing have helped me tremendously.
Wait that's very interesting. Any suggs for bio hacking?
Iiuc zinc can be tricky/fraught to experiment with and iron somewhat risky. Don't know about B2.
So perhaps start with each one on small dose, one week one, two weeks off, keep a journal, making no other changes?
And any suggs for things to avoid?
Noaidi•Aug 22, 2026
I would never suggest anything. We each have our own genetic/environmental needs. But you can get tested for many of these nutrients to see if you have a deficiency.
madaxe_again•Aug 22, 2026
I find enough weed to sink a battleship also works.
Whenever I’m having a dream at night, it’s always about my childhood and always at the place I grew up. It feels like my mind is a prisoner of the place I grew up. Childhood stress and trauma is deeply burnt into my brain I guess
cfiggers•Aug 22, 2026
EMDR is an amazing thing, you might look into it. Be well, friend.
9 Comments
1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted. 2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career. 3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards.
Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
12-14 was rough.
School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/
Things like abuse, neglect, natural disasters, basically anything that can cause trauma or significant stress.
Be a toddler and your mom's new boyfriend abuses both of you? Congrats, you brain has developed in a way that will not be conducive at all to your future, because instead of developing a functional reward system, you've developed a specific hyperawareness to manage the difficulty of living around one kind of abuser. This incredibly specific adaptation will of course, not prevent you from being an easy target for an entirely different type of abuser in high school.
(It's actually not that simple of course. Multiple ACEs are predictive of future troubles, not just one, so it's more like "A child who lives in an environment of constant stress, fear, and pain is likely to have a brain that didn't develop well" with a direction of effect unstated)
This is one reason why things like abuse and poverty are so damn cyclical. Your parents grew up in poverty and with abusive parents, so they have an elevated chance to abuse their children, and on and on and on.
This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids, and in the US, it also eliminates the horrific humiliation machine we've built around paying for school lunch, which might not be the best way to raise kids anyway.
By society, I mean every one of us that plans to grow old instead of an early death.
Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three or ideally more generations of well adjusted people that grew up not fearful of hunger, nor lack of basic shelter, medical care?
Also, providing quality child care for any time the parent(s) are working frees up quality workers to do that... though a better work life balance would also help society.
Plus almost everyone can get into a college, there is only really competition for a handful of elite schools. My college wanted SAT scores for admission, I did not take the SAT, they still admitted me without question. As long as you don't fail out your first two semesters in a row most colleges don't give two craps about your highschool performance.
Treating 16 to 18 year old like 5 year olds is not the right way to go about it.
>> More than half of the world’s children are exposed to early-life stress from abuse, household dysfunction such as violence or drug use, or other traumatic experiences
It wasn't until my late 20s that I started living a more 'normal' life, but by then I was a decade behind in career development and other things.
Academic concerns may not by themselves count as trauma, but combined with other factors they can be the thing that pushes someone into total hopelessness.
My childhood ACE's: Woke up on an operating table when I was three, mother and brother attempted suicide, Mother with schizoaffective disorder, physical abuse by my brothers, psychological torture by my brother (he forced me to watch him burn a nest full of baby birds with a blow torch).
But shit man, yeah, exams.
The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.
Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.
If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.
This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”
That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.
Yes, and it (or at least one of them) has now been found. Maybe you don't care about knowledge for its own sake, but as the "irritating" press release goes on to point out,
“There are currently no treatments for what early-life stress does to the brain, partially because we have not had a clear picture of what molecular mechanisms to target,” Peña said. “This work is exciting because it reveals a clear mechanism, and also helps explain why the impact of stress is both latent and broad.
Also hundreds of thousands of kids throughout parts of Central and South America.
And then of course, there are the millions throughout Africa.
Don't even get me started on all the future Iranian soldiers we're "training" right now.
And on and on and on.
Point being, a world where children are not made to suffer is a world that can't exist as long as humans are humans. Because adults, from the time before time, have made victims of kids.
I'm not sure it's able to be stopped? It seems part of the human condition.
Yet somehow there are many places in which it has pretty much stopped?
> I'm not sure it's able to be stopped? It seems part of the human condition.
The most important part of human nature/the human condition is our ability - or perhaps even need - to reflect and grow and change. It happens slowly, but it inevitably happens.
Any way though, I'm not really sure what your point is. That we shouldn't care or try to stop it because it's "part of the human condition"? That we must care about all these injustices equally? That if we can't address all these injustices equally, we mustn't address any?
And,
Any way though, I'm not really sure what your point is.
You quoted the part where I said what my point was?
This isn't a means problem, it is a will problem.
> https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
You can't just dismiss the result because you think it's unlikely to be something that affects a lot of people.
There is a theory in transactional analysis therapy that states adult addiction (in all its forms) pretty much always stems from childhood trauma...
I am a product of early life trauma. Knowing these thing have helped me tremendously.
[1] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q8NB78/entry
Iiuc zinc can be tricky/fraught to experiment with and iron somewhat risky. Don't know about B2.
So perhaps start with each one on small dose, one week one, two weeks off, keep a journal, making no other changes?
And any suggs for things to avoid?