Naughty by Nature?

It is hard to read any article or book about what ails children today without encountering a discussion of "ACEs," or "adverse childhood experiences." Doctors, teachers, therapists, and pundits now regularly talk about ACEs—which include parental divorce, alcoholism, poverty, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, death of a parent, etc.—with what sounds like the same kind of biological certainty as, say, blood pressure or cholesterol levels. We can just add these factors up and then spit out a "score," which will then tell us the likelihood that you will become a functional adult. If your score is too high, we can take a "trauma-informed" approach to fixing you. In his new book, The Nature of Nurture, child psychologist and UC Davis professor Jay Belsky acknowledges that these experiences have an impact on adulthood. But he offers a different way of understanding the connection. He wants us to consider the possibility that while the development of these victimized children may be different from what we consider to be good or normal, nothing has gone "awry" in their trajectory from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary theory suggests that individuals are driven to behave in certain ways not just to promote their own survival but to ensure the survival of their genes.

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