Early life challenges affect how children focus on activities

New Delhi, June 7 (ANI): Facing adversities and challenges during the early years of lives affect children's executive function skills and their ability to focus and organize tasks, recent findings suggest. According to the study, experiences such as poverty, residential instability, or parental divorce or substance abuse, can lead to changes in a child's brain chemistry, muting the effects of stress hormones. These hormones are responsible to help us face challenges, stress, or to simply help us "get up and go."Together, these impacts to executive function and stress hormones create a snowball effect, adding to social and emotional challenges that can continue through childhood. As part of this study, a team of researchers examined how adversity can change the ways children develop. The study, published in the Journal of Development and Psychopathology, evaluated 306 children at intervals over more than two years, starting when participants were around 3 years old, up to age 5 1/2. C