A new study has found that the way children process troubling events is much different from that of the way of adults. The study, which appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry, conducted interviews with 1,420 kids at ages 9, 11, and 13 who were representative of the general U.S. population between 1993 and 2000.By the age of 16, 68 % of them had gone through at least one traumatic event, for example; the violent death of a loved one, physical abuse by a relative, sexual abuse, fire, natural disaster, or a serious accident.
Despite these high amounts, very few of these kids showed any signs of Post Traumatic Stress. In fact only about 13.4 % of the children who experienced a traumatic event showed any signs by the age of 16, and fewer than 0.5 % actually met the criteria for the disorder. However, they were not immune to signs of depression, or anxiety.
Children simply do not react the way they are predicted to by doctors, in comparisson to adults who PTSD usually affects after a triggering event, such as war, rape, natural disaster or serious illness.
William Copeland of Duke University Medical Center who conducted the study, said the results suggests clinicians should be looking at a wider range of symptoms when they are evaluating the effects of trauma in children.
"This may be more common than we thought, but it also seems like kids do OK after being exposed to trauma," he said. "On the other hand, there's a wide range of things we need to keep our eyes on."
Why do you think that this it? Could it possibly be a simple case of the fact that adults know more about the world around them and consequences that occur? Therefore making children simply more naive which in turn protects them?
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