How Early Life Adversity Transforms the Learning Brain

Abstract

For educators to help children exposed to adverse life experiences, it is necessary to understand how adversity impacts different mechanisms of learning, emotion, and planning as these capacities underpin success in schools and beyond. The goal of this paper is to review essential findings on how early life adversity transforms the brain which, in turn, impacts educational outcomes. Part 1 begins by discussing the species-specific and expectant experiences that guide typical development, and then turns to early life adversities and their relationship to both physical and mental health outcomes. Part 2 summarizes four dimensions of adversity-type, timing, term, and toxicity-and how each differentially impacts the developing brain, including individual differences in psychopathology. Part 3 discusses the relevance of these findings for educators, highlighting how behavior can be modified to build resilience and greater academic and social-emotional competency. Throughout the world, children experience adversity, including emotional and physical neglect, poverty, war, physical and sexual abuse, family dysfunction and mental health problems (Asmundson & Afifi, 2020; Blum, Li, & Naranjo-Rivera, 2019). Analyses of data from the World Health Organization suggest that close to 40% of all children have experienced one or more types of adversity before the age of 18 years, with little difference between highand low-income countries (Kessler et al., 2010). Bellis et al. (2019) estimate that the total annual cost of such adverse childhood experiences is $748 billion in Europe and $581 billion in North America. Some individuals respond to such adversity with internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Adversity, in this sense, entails situations in which there are atypical environmental perturbations that are serious or severe, often chronic, and necessitate significant adaptive responses (McLaughlin, 2016). As Nelson, Bhutta,

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