Childhood Adversity and Developmental Effects: An International, Cross-Disciplinary Approach

Child trauma and violence is not an issue that is constrained to one nationality or one ethnicity. A staggering number of children around the world are subjected to violence and abuse, both domestic and political. The current volume examines the issue of developmental trauma from a variety of viewpoints, including sociological, epidemiological, genetic, and psychiatric. The chapters contained within are broken into the following sections:

• Child neglect and violence from an international perspective
• The effects of war and armed conflict on children's health and development
• The impact of childhood trauma on mental and physical health into adulthood
• Case studies of interventions that provide possibilities for treatment in a variety of different contexts

Written by a researcher from Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital (Boston), this book provides an important resource for understanding violence as an almost ubiquitous presence in children's lives around the world, as well as offering directions for treatment and interventions. This book is an important resource for researchers, counselors, psychologists, child advocates, and anyone who seeks to understand how adversity in childhood affects a person's entire life.

Lisa Albers Prock, MD, MPH is a developmental behavioral pediatrician at Children’s Hospital (Boston) where she co-founded and directs the Adoption Program and works in the Developmental Medicine Center. She is a co-director of the Translational Neuroscience Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, and she is the director of Developmental Behavioral Pediatric Services at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where her responsibilities include clinical director of the Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics Fellowship Program. She also is active in international health and resident/fellow education. She attended college at the University of Chicago, medical school at Columbia University and received a master’s degree in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. At the end of her training, she worked as a primary care pediatrician at a community health center and as an inpatient hospital physician. After obtaining a public health degree in international health, she lived and worked in Cambodia where she taught pediatrics and studied the epidemiology of tuberculosis in children. She returned to Boston for further training in general pediatrics and development as a Dyson Fellow at Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Prock is currently involved in translational research efforts as the principal investigator for four clinical trials working with adolescents and young adults with Fragile X Syndrome. She is also co-director of the clinical arm of the Translational Neuroscience Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, a multidisciplinary collaboration to accelerate the translation of basic science findings into clinical meaning for children with developmental disabilities and their families. Dr. Prock has also combined her clinical interests in child development and international health with advocacy for children, particularly in the areas of foster care and adoption. She has been working with adoptees (both domestic and international) involved in medical, residential, and educational settings since 1991.

Her research interests include the long-term developmental, behavioral, and emotional concerns of adoptees. She has co-authored several original publications, edited several reference volumes, and written numerous articles. She has been a board member for several nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Family Connections, a family therapy organization specializing in issues for foster-care and adoptive families; Adoptive Families Together, a parent support group specific to adoptive families; and the Treehouse Foundation, a foster family empowerment program. She has received numerous local and national awards for her work with children and families, most recently the 2004 United States Congressional Angel in Adoption Award. She is a past chairperson of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Adoption and Foster Care and current executive committee member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Foster Care, Kinship and Adoption.