That’s the finding from a new United Nations report released this week showing that an estimated 87 million children under the age of 7 have lived their entire lives in conflict zones, an environment so stressful that it has the potential to significantly impact the development of their brains.
The discovery stems from a report released Thursday by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), an organization that works to bring resources to children in the 22 countries affected by conflict worldwide. This year the organization released a reportshowing that one in four of the more than 100 million school-age kids living in these zones are not in school.
“In addition to the immediate physical threats that children in crises face, they are also at risk of deep-rooted emotional scars,” said UNICEF Chief of Early Child Development Pia Britto, one of the main researchers behind the study.
The scars are not metaphorical: Stress actually rewires young brains.
Humans are born with 253 functioning neurons, nerve cells that receive and transmit information. From that point onwards, hundreds of new neurons are formed every second, until there are nearly 1 billion in most adults.
That’s just the number of circuits, but how they are wired depends on what happens in development.
Harvard researchers elaborated on the process in a 2004 paper titled Excessive Stress Disrupts the Architecture of the Developing Brain. In it, they explain how healthy development can be “derailed” by toxic stress.