In her ground-breaking parenting book published in May, author Margot Sunderland reveals how widely practised parenting techniques for babies and young children could be having a major influence on whether our children grow up to be bullies or victims.
The Science of Parenting  (published by DK) draws on the results of over 800 worldwide neuro-scientific studies to show how techniques advocated by popular childcare experts such as 'Sleep Training ' and 'Time Out ' can have lasting damaging effects on brain functions and the chemical balance within the brain.
According to Sunderland "The risk of bringing up a bully or thug is largely determined by the kind of parenting a child receives. Well-meaning parents often do not realize that the techniques they use to parent their child may actually be changing emotional chemical and stress-response systems in the child 's brain".
The book explains how any parenting method that leaves a child in a prolonged state of distress can be extremely detrimental. "If you ignore a crying child or over-use time out, tell them to shut up or put them in a room of their own, you can cause serious damage to their brains on a level that can result in severe neurosis and emotional disorders later in life."
Why 'Time Out ' can be harmful:
" 'Time Out ' isn 't wrong as a discipline measure per-se", concedes Sunderland. "The danger comes when we don 't understand when to use it. I worry that a parent who sees the technique on a TV show may not fully appreciate when it is appropriate, and use it to discipline a child who is actually in distress and needs comfort not punishment."
When we don 't help a child who is genuinely distressed or in wild storms of rage to cope with their intense feelings it has all kinds of implications. Their brain may not develop essential pathways to enable them to effectively manage stressful situations, which in turn can predispose them to over-react with angry outbursts or suffer from depression or persistent anxiety states later in life. It can also leave children unable to develop the higher human capacities for compassion and concern. Playground studies have shown that some children from backgrounds where they have not experienced enough sympathy for their distress have a lack of concern for crying children. Some will even try to "shut them up" by humiliating or attacking them.
What happens to the brain of a child who is left in distress:
• High levels of toxic stress hormones wash over their brain
• There is a withdrawal of opioids in their brain
• The brain and body 's stress response systems can become hard-wired for over-sensitivity
• Pain circuits in the brain are activated, just as they would be if they were hurt physically.
Statistics:
• More than half of all children have experienced bullying at school
• 17,000 children in the UK are excluded from school each year for bad behaviour
40,000 children in the UK are taking
"It is vital that governments start to look more closely at the impact of common child-rearing practices on the brain, to insure as much as we can against the continuation of the terrible scale of human suffering around the world" says Sunderland
Margot Sunderland is Director of Education and Training for the Centre of Child Mental Health in London, with over 20 years experience of working with children and families. She is the author of more than 20 published books on child mental health.
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