Make Your Child Genius

When kids are threatened by their parents or their environment, when they are abused, or when they are otherwise experiencing high level of stress, their brains are actually being scarred.  This is according to a study by the Stanford University Medical Center and reported by the BBC News Online. 
The scientists discovered that the hippocampus of children with post-traumatic stress disorder had shrunk.  The hippocampus is a brain structure that assists in storing and sorting memory and emotion.  The withered hippocampus may make children "less able to deal with stress and increase anxiety." 
The study published in the journal Pedriatrics also revealed that stressed children had higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. 

If cortisol is present in the child at high levels, it kills brain cells and impedes the child's intellectual development.  It interferes with the brain's ability to form memory by inhibiting the use of blood sugar by the hippocampus.  It also interferes with the neurotransmitters making appropriate connections within the brain, resulting in the kid's inability to concentrate and learn.  In other studies, it was shown that kids who are stressed in their first 3 years tend to be sensitive to stress. Their brains are hard-wired to overreact to stressful situations and they end up hyperactive, anxious, impulsive and oftentimes neurotic.