SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A link between childhood stress and early molars:
"I've long been concerned that if kids grow up too fast, their brains will mature too fast and will lose plasticity at an earlier age. Then they'll go into school and have trouble learning at the same rate as their peers," says Mackey, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Penn. "Of course, not every kid who experiences stress or [is] low income will show this pattern of accelerated development."
What would help, she thought, was a scalable, objective way -- a physical manifestation, of sorts -- to indicate how children embodied and responded to stresses in their world. Eruption timing of the first permanent molars proved to be just that.
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mackey, with doctoral student Cassidy McDermott and colleagues from Penn's School of Dental Medicine and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shows that children from lower-income backgrounds and those who go through greater adverse childhood experiences get their first permanent molars earlier. The findings, generated initially from a small study and replicated using a nationally representative dataset, align with a broader pattern of accelerated development often seen under conditions of early-life stress.
Journal Reference:
Cassidy L. McDermott, Katherine Hilton, Anne T. Park, et al. Early life stress is associated with earlier emergence of permanent molars [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105304118)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @03:52PM
My comment wasn't about the article. My comment was clearly about the statement by Mackey. I even made the problematic part bold. Her thinking immediately gives excuse to 50% of the school population why they struggle and that population needs that excuse the least. Now you have immediate group of individuals with more excuses to fail. A huge disservice to the entire community.
We all know that an apple does not fall far from the tree. People from disadvantaged backgrounds need all the help they can get and one thing is you don't tell them they are disadvantaged. Your own perception and drive is how you move up in the social ladder in many nations around the world (at least the ones we call 'free'). You tell someone they are probably going to be a loser because their ancestors were or because their early life was difficult is sure way to shape their future, especially if they start to believe this.