It’s because it begins very young. I’ve seen my friend hit her SIX MONTH OLD because they reached out to grab glasses that she puts in front of her. To train up a child? some bullshit religious “child training” program is often used in religious communities.
More frequent parental punitive discipline was significantly associated with smaller dorsal striatal volume in children, consistent with research demonstrating striatal differences following exposure to severe early life stress. Moreover, these results are consistent with a growing body of research linking normative variation in parental care with children’s brain structure. They align more specifically with recent work linking negative parenting (e.g., aggressive behavior, hostility) with reward processing neuroanatomy in adolescents and frontal-striatal functional connectivity in children.
Smaller dorsal striatal volume was significantly associated with higher depressive symptoms in children, consistent with previous work that has mainly focused on MDD in adolescents or adults. Thus, this study extends previous work by showing similar associations in a community sample of children who did not have psychiatric diagnoses. These findings suggest that changes in striatal morphology may precede the onset of MDD, [Major depressive disorder] which typically occurs in adolescence or adulthood