Editorial: Sharpening Our Focus on Early Adversity, Development, and Resilience Through Cross-National Research

Abstract

The impacts of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study continue to reverberate across medicine, influencing clinical practice, research, and public policy, prompting reexamination of the original ACEs research, and generating a range of new research questions that are critical for understanding health and development across the lifespan.^1,2 Within child and adolescent psychiatry, this explosion of interest in childhood trauma and its consequences is generating rich new areas of inquiry: how does adversity become biologically embedded in brain structure and functioning? What familial, environmental, and genetic factors influence resilience and risk? How should we update and adapt the original ACEs framework to account for cultural, ethnic, and geographic differences across populations with various exposures during childhood and distinct ways of experiencing and understanding these exposures? What positive experiences during childhood might have equally profound lifelong health impacts? In this issue of the Journal, Salhi et al.³ present findings from a large cross-national survey of parents of young children to examine their hypotheses that particular household exposures, physical discipline, and lack of cognitive stimulation represent adverse experiences associated with specific developmental outcomes in young children. Like much related research emerging in this area, the present study may provoke more new questions than it answers, and the article sharpens our focus to better understand the developmental science of early adversity and its implications for mental health promotion and clinical care.