Coparent Academy Podcast
Lifechanging Coparenting
Coparent Academy Podcast
#143 - How Stress Affects Children During Pregnancy
This is Episode 2 in our Raising Emotionally Resilient Children series.
In this episode we dig into the epigenetic effects of stressors on children during pregnancy.
We discuss:
- The Diathesis-Stress Model
- Epigenetics
- Prenatal Brain Development
- Prenatal Programming (aka DOHad or the Barker Hypothesis)
- Examples including the epigenetic effects of the:
- Descendants of Holocaust survivors; and
- Children born to mothers who were pregnant with them during the Quebec Ice Storm of 1998
Check out the Youtube version of this episode for some additional visual content and links to research articles reviewed and/or relied upon for the content in this episode.
Thanks for listening! If you have questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at podcast@coparentacademy.com. To learn more about becoming the best coparent you can be, visit coparentacademy.com.
Welcome everybody to this week's episode of Co-Parent Academy Podcast. Today we're going to continue our conversation about the development of the child's emotional brain, eventually getting into conversations about attachment. This week I kind of went into a real rabbit hole looking at how the emotional brain gets developed and what affects a child's development, starting with in utero. You know what happens while they're a fetus and I was planning on going from in utero all the way through, maybe the first two years of life, but there was just so much information about things that can happen to affect a child while they're in utero that I'm not getting stuck there not in utero, but in talking about that portion of a child's life. So today I'm just going to be focusing on what happens when there are stressors that affects a mother while she's pregnant with a child. What are the changes that can be passed on to a child because of those stresses? As I mentioned in the last episode, I have tons of notes on this. I don't have a script per se that I'm reading from, so I'm going to be going back and forth looking at my notes as a reminder. Also, we now have these podcasts being put up on YouTube as well, so if you're seeing this on YouTube, you'll see me looking down at notes and pausing and things like that as I check everything out. Something else to let you know for today's episode I'm going to start putting up maybe some images that are related to what we're talking about, and I'll point out some of the times when I'm going to do that. Sometimes I'll be adding things, maybe after I've recorded this. I'll be adding them later. So check the YouTube video to see some additional content that might be a visual representation of some of the stuff that we're talking about. Also, in researching this, I have tons of academic papers that I looked at, that I read through, and I will be posting those links to those papers on the YouTube page, those links to those papers on the YouTube page. And yes, that is an effort to get you guys to go check out the YouTube as well.
Speaker 1:So here's the basic idea for today. The idea is that we have genetic predispositions for certain things, and particularly what we're concerned about for this is the emotional development. So there can be psychological disorders, for example, for which a child has a genetic predisposition. But that's not the whole story. There's something that's known as the diathesis stress model. Diathesis is a word that refers to a vulnerability. That vulnerability in this case is a genetic predisposition for something that would not be necessarily helpful. The stress portion is the environmental stress that is put on a child. So the combination is that diathesis, the vulnerability plus the environmental stress, that external stressor of whatever kind that can lead to potentially a disorder. Another way to think about it is vulnerability plus an adverse life event can lead to a disorder. Certainly, that can have an impact for us as we're growing up.
Speaker 1:Growing up also, I find that lots of co-parents who are in ongoing conflict themselves have had many adverse life effects and those adverse life effects are manifested at times in co-parenting conflict. So this is important in two ways. In two ways, I want you to be thinking about the content today in terms of how is it important to make sure that you can avoid unnecessary stressors on a mother during her pregnancy? And if you're trying to understand your own behaviors or the behaviors of your co-parent that you may think are unhelpful, to what degree can there be some explanation not an excuse, but some explanation related to adverse life events that were experienced both in utero and during childhood? Again, I'm not saying that those are excuses for poor behavior. But sometimes, if we can start to understand why we're behaving a certain way, or maybe why our co-parent is behaving a certain way, that increase in understanding can bring a little objectivity and a little distance from the emotion. It can help us observe the behaviors in a different light so that we're not as triggered by them and focusing on the adverse events that can happen while a child's in utero. I want to get this main concept across Prenatal adaptations to maternal stress can come at a cost.
Speaker 1:This is going to get us into a conversation about epigenetics. So when we think about adaptations, I think often we're thinking about conscious things. You know like oh, you know, I'm dealing with the situation, I'm going to adapt in a certain way. But not all adaptations are conscious adaptations. A lot of them are biological. A fetus will have adaptations to stressors that they're experiencing in utero without a fully developed brain. It's a biological result. It's not a conscious effort. Sometimes those prenatal adaptations will give short-term benefits to the fetus, but they can come at a potentially negative long-term cost.
Speaker 1:If you go back to that concept of the diathesis stress model, we can frame it this way Depending on the genetic predisposition and the stressors producing epigenetic changes, there can be some poor neurodevelopmental outcomes right, it increases the risk. Poor neurodevelopmental outcomes right, it increases the risk. Prenatal adaptations can be associated with a future risk of poor neurodevelopmental results. And that depends based on the diathesis stress model, depends both on the genetic predisposition and also on the epigenetic changes that occur. So I've already said epigenetics twice at least. What does epigenetics mean? So it may help to think about it this way. It's how behaviors and the environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. It's not a change to the DNA code, it's a change to how that DNA code, that set of instructions, is expressed. Here's an analogy that helps me think about it and it may help you too. So think about your DNA as a score of music. Right, that's the code.
Speaker 1:Those notes are written on your page. That is the musical score of your life, and that score was created by the combination of both your mother and your father's DNA. That score can't be changed. Those notes are written on the paper given to you. But you can take that sheet music, that score of your life, and you can change how you play it. The same notes are on the page, but there may be some instructions that you can add onto that sheet music. Play it a little bit faster here, slow down there. Maybe this note is played more forcefully, this section is played more softly. Those notes that you place on the sheet music of your life, that's epigenetics. It doesn't change the sheet music, it changes how you play the sheet music. So epigenetics are the notes that you make on the sheet music of your dna. Those notes are made both while you're in the womb and after you're born.
Speaker 1:This concept is that parental stress alters a child's development. The stress that a mother feels while she's pregnant alters the development of the child and that alteration is going to wind up being biological and it can also be psychological. So the kinds of stresses that we're thinking about vary. You can have psychosocial stress, things like financial difficulties, interpersonal conflicts between the mother and her family, the mother and her friends you know the mother and the father of her child. You can have pregnancy-specific stressors. You know concerns about fetal health, complications during pregnancy. There can be catastrophic events that occur, things like war, natural disaster, famine.
Speaker 1:The impact of this stress varies. It varies in lots of ways. Remember that diathesis stress model. It can vary depending on the genetic predisposition toward having some sort of condition or some sort of negative outcome. It can depend on the type of stress. It can depend on when that stress is imposed on the fetus. It can deal on the type of stress. It can depend on when that stress is imposed on the fetus. It can deal with the level of that stressor. You can have stressors of the same kind. You can have interpersonal conflict. If it's minimal, it may have a reduced stress. If it's very, very bad interpersonal conflict, it can have a much greater effect. It can even have changes depending on the sex of the child. There's some studies regarding schizophrenia and ADHD, for example, that indicate that there may be differential outcomes for boys and girls when it comes to different types of fetal stress at different points in the gestational period.
Speaker 1:There are a couple of really good examples of this possibility of epigenetic change that I want to point out, and I'm going to talk about these in a little bit of detail. The first is the epigenetic changes that affected children of Holocaust survivors. The second is going to be the epigenetic changes of children whose mothers were pregnant with them during the Quebec ice storm of 1998. So let's start earlier in time with the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Now this is getting into a portion where at some point in this conversation, I'm going to put an image on the screen for the YouTube video watchers that has a diagram showing the different combinations of stressors on different ancestors and what that produced in the descendants of Holocaust survivors. So the Holocaust provided, unfortunately, one of the strongest examples of how the effect of different experiences during prenatal development, childhood and adolescence can affect us later in life and also affect our descendants. As we talk about this example, I'm going to keep this in mind.
Speaker 1:Epigenetic changes are designed. The reason they exist is to biologically prepare offspring for an environment that's similar to that that their parents experienced. It's the fetus essentially projecting into the future what their body is going to need and trying to adapt to it while in the womb. But sometimes those epigenetic changes can backfire because the circumstances of the world into which the child is born may be very different than the circumstances experienced by their mother during the pregnancy. So they're preparing for something that is different. Once they're born, the fetus is preparing for an environment that doesn't actually exist. The adaptations would definitely serve the fetus's short-term needs, but can have negative long-term consequences.
Speaker 1:Let's look first at survivors of the Holocaust, because they had epigenetic changes as well. Survivors of the Holocaust were shown to have lower levels of cortisol, which is a hormone that helps the body return to normal after trauma, and those who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD had even lower cortisol levels. It was also shown that Holocaust survivors had lower levels of an enzyme that breaks down cortisol. This enzyme keeps more free cortisol in the body and it allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuel. This, for the Holocaust survivors themselves, was an optimal response to periods of starvation and the other kinds of threats that they were experiencing. If you look at younger survivors of the Holocaust, who were infants, young children, even up to adolescence, during the Holocaust, even later in life, they had less of that enzyme. So for them, that was an epigenetic change that lasted with them through their lifetime. Because, remember, as we're growing, we're going through all sorts of changes. Our neuroplasticity is much greater. We have much more opportunity to make changes that last. We've seen that the survivors of the Holocaust had epigenetic changes that adapted them for the environment in which they were experiencing the difficulties they went through. Their descendants had epigenetic changes as well.
Speaker 1:Like their parents, children born of Holocaust survivors had lower levels of cortisol, especially if their mother had PTSD. Here's the problem Unlike their parents, these children had higher than normal levels of the cortisol-busting enzyme that we talked about a minute ago. So the theory about why this happened is that it happened in utero, while the fetus was developing the enzyme that we're talking about. That busts the cortisol, is usually present in high levels in the placenta and that protects the child from the mother's cortisol. The problem here is that the pregnant Holocaust survivors had low levels of that enzyme in their system. They needed that low level of enzyme. The effect of that was that a greater level of cortisol was able to make its way to the fetus. The fetus responded to that by developing high levels of the enzyme designed to protect itself from that cortisol. So this is an example of the immediate need of the fetus to protect itself from that high level of cortisol being counterproductive in the long term. And here's how it's counterproductive Because these children had low levels of cortisol but at the same time had higher levels of the cortisol-busting enzyme.
Speaker 1:The overall effect is that they would be less able to survive starvation themselves. That's not it. There's other studies as well into these children, and here's what these studies have shown, the children of Holocaust survivors are more vulnerable to the effects of stress, are more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD and are also at greater risk for metabolic syndromes. That includes things like obesity, hypertension and insulin resistance, and their risk for these things increases during times of prosperity, during times where there's more food available. So they're less likely to be able to deal well with starvation and they're more likely to suffer these age-related metabolic disorders when times are good. So they got kind of a double whammy there.
Speaker 1:So now let's talk about the Quebec ice storm of 1998. So in January of 1998, there was this huge ice storm that hit Quebec. Over a period of three and a half days or so. Four days the temperatures dropped to between negative four and 14 degrees Fahrenheit. All sorts of negative effects occurred, as you can imagine. We're going to get into what those negative effects were and the impact on the children of the survivors of the Quebec ice storm who were pregnant during that period of time, on the children of the survivors of the Quebec ice storm who were pregnant during that period of time. But here's sort of an interesting thing about it that I want to point out that makes this study into the children of the Quebec ice storm survivors. Truly interesting and also unique. It's unethical to design a study in which you intentionally place a pregnant woman under stress to observe what the epigenetic effect will be on the offspring, right, you can't do that. They do that kind of thing in animal studies, which also has ethical implications, obviously, but certainly cannot be done with human mothers and their infants. So a disaster like the Quebec ice storm created a natural experiment. The researchers didn't have the ethical problem of simulating a situation or creating a situation in which the mother is going to experience this stress. These mothers were suffering these stressors just because they were existing at that moment in Quebec. They were existing at that moment in Quebec.
Speaker 1:Dysorm also presented a unique opportunity to separate perceived stress from objective stress. Part of the difficulty that researchers have had are all the confounding variables in trying to determine what the cause of an effect on a fetus is. Is it a perceived level of stress? So, for example we mentioned before, if you have interparental conflict, there can be varying degrees of interparental conflict. But also two different people could perceive what to others would objectively be the same level of stress differentially. So it's hard to tease out. Was that an objective level of stress that was causing this outcome? Or was it the parent's perception of that stress? And it doesn't matter. Additionally, there are other factors right, there is the genetic predispositions, right, those vulnerabilities that we talked about. There's also different intrauterine environments. There are different things going on with the placenta, different conditions that occur, separate from the stress during pregnancy, that can cause difficulties. In the case of the Quebec ice storm, you had a fairly robust population of three million people who were subject to the same conditions. It was essentially a randomized study and because it was a randomized study, essentially for this population of people, that permitted the researchers to have the greater ability to separate out the effects of objective stressors on the children.
Speaker 1:So, as I mentioned, the storm occurred in January of 1998. Ice storm temperatures plunged from negative 4 to 14 degrees and devastation occurred. The ice took down the power lines, took down the utility poles collapsed the power grid. People who were on well water weren't able to get it. People who were on commuter trains got stuck. They had to call in the military to try to help the survivors. You had people trying to keep themselves warm however they could, starting fires. Just pandemonium, just a really tough time for everybody. For as long as six weeks, up to three million people in Quebec, especially in one particular province, were affected by these outages and by the cold weather. Immediately after the ice storm, the weather became a little bit more mild, but then it went right back down to the more seasonal low temperatures and there was a lot of hardship for a lot of people. Many people died, tens of people. A number I saw was at least 27. I don't know what that means, but for sure 27 people died directly because of the Quebec ice storm.
Speaker 1:13 years after the storm, scientists took various samples from these kids, who were now 12 and 13 years old, and looked to see what kind of changes they could find, that they could connect back to their mother's experience during the ice storm while their children were in utero, and they found clear evidence. They found clear evidence of changes to how the children's DNA was methylized. So if you're like me, you're asking what does that mean? What does it mean to be methylized? So here's methylization and how to understand it. So if you imagine that your DNA has just thousands of these little switches, like light switches, that are dimmers and you can increase the intensity of the light or decrease the intensity of the light. That is similar to the expression of genes in your DNA. You can turn it up. You can turn the expression down. Methyl groups are biochemicals that are added to these little switches. Methylization is the process of adding the methyl groups to the switches.
Speaker 1:So the researchers were able to see changes in how these methyl groups were added to the children's DNA, which affected the expression of certain genes. The greatest impact the researchers found were on two kinds of genes. They found immune system genes greatly affected and that can increase a child's risk for things like asthma or allergies. And they also found genes related to metabolism affected, which could impact the risk of obesity or diabetes. So they're continuing to study these children to see what real-world implications there are, because just because there's the opportunity for the expression to be changed in a way that's negative doesn't mean that it actually will. That's one of the great things about these epigenetic changes they're fluid, they're not set in stone. Remember, they're markings on the sheet music of your dna, they're not the musical notes that are set in stone. There can still be helpful changes that help these children avoid negative impacts from these changes in the methylization of their DNA.
Speaker 1:You may be thinking you know why does this matter? I'm going to tie it back in a few minutes to co-parenting more explicitly, but I want to remind you that we're talking about this because it's easy for us to forget that when a mother is pregnant with a child, she's not alone in this world. That fetus that's developing inside of her is experiencing the world through her. The fetus is experiencing the stress that she's under. If she's going without resources, the fetus reacts to that. If there are higher levels of cortisol because of conflict, the fetus reacts to that. So it's always the case when we're dealing with custody matters in court that we're dealing with the child who's been born. The court has no jurisdiction over the child until the child's been born. Right, the court has no jurisdiction over the child until the child's been born. But very often the impacts of the conflict that led to the separation of the parents is occurring during pregnancy.
Speaker 1:Some of you right now may be in a co-parenting situation, may be in a situation where you're thinking about separating or divorcing, and ladies some of you may be pregnant divorcing. And ladies some of you may be pregnant. Men some of your partners may be pregnant if you're pregnant or if your partner's pregnant and you're going through conflict, unnecessary, unhelpful, out of bounds conflict. It's not just unhelpful for you yourselves, you're damaging. It's not just unhelpful for you yourselves, you're damaging children who have not yet been born. That's the purpose of today, that's the purpose of this podcast is to help you understand that the negative emotions, the stress, the conflict is going to make changes in children who haven't yet been born.
Speaker 1:When we're weighing the pros and cons of engaging in conflict for the sake of conflict, this is an area that I think I had never really thought about before, and maybe you haven't either, but I hope after today you will. So let's step back a little bit. I just want to talk about how a child's brain develops. It's going to be very, very brief because none of us likely are going to really understand the science anyway, but I just want to talk through it very briefly.
Speaker 1:So these are the key phases of prenatal brain development. You've got what they call the embryonic phase, which is from conception up to eight weeks. So they're the brain's basic structures established and it lays the foundation for all the future growth. The next period is called early fetal development. That early fetal period is from 8 to 20 weeks, and this is kind of interesting. During this period billions of neurons are being generated and neurons migrate to form the neurocortex and that's going to begin to regulate higher order functions in the child's brain. Then you have late fetal period, which is 20 weeks until birth, and this is when the different regions of your brain begin to specialize and this forms the cortical layers and the connections that are necessary for communication in the brain. This is also a period when something called synaptogenesis is really starting to gear up, and this number kind of blew me away there's up to 40,000 new synapses forming per second by the late third trimester. This is also the period when myelination, which we talked about a little bit before and that enhances the speed and efficiency of neuronal connections, begins. That's between 20 and 28 weeks. So as this child's brain is developing, 28 weeks. So as this child's brain is developing.
Speaker 1:Think about the plasticity. Things are changing at phenomenal rates. These stressors that the fetus is experiencing are having rapid, immediate impacts on how these connections are formed. And remember, it's not changing the child's DNA, that's already in place. It's epigenetically changing. These are impacts that are going to change the expression of those genes. So here's some critical influences on brain development in neutero One, environmental sensitivity. So in this situation we're talking about again the fetal brain's plasticity. This plasticity is what allows the fetus's brain to develop the way that it can, but it also makes it vulnerable. It makes it highly vulnerable to adverse conditions like maternal stress or poor nutrition. So you can't have these rapid changes without the risk of unhelpful changes being made During this period.
Speaker 1:Maternal stress and anxiety can alter the fetal brain. It alters how the fetal brain is programmed and it does that through biological mechanisms like heightened cortisol levels or immune activation. Right Whenever our body feels attacked or stressed, it responds unconsciously and those responses in the mother will affect the fetus. We talked about that example where the children of Holocaust survivors were being bombarded with this cortisol and so they had increased levels of the enzyme to battle cortisol and that hurt them later in life. That's an example of this. Another example is that a mother's stress during pregnancy has been linked to changes and I have to read this one in fetal hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. It's called the HPA axis and this matters because the potential result is increasing the child's sensitivity to stress later in life. So the effects of these adverse conditions that can affect a mother during pregnancy, like we said, depends on a bunch of things. One of the things that it depends on is the timing of the application of the stress to the fetus through the mother. Here's an example If you have a mother's immune system activated early in pregnancy, that can disrupt how the neurons are migrating in the child's brain early on. If the mother's immune system is activated later during the pregnancy, that can affect changes in the formation of synapses, because, if you remember, those things were happening at different time periods, right, the neurons were in that mid-gestational period and the synapsogenesis that was in the later part, from 20 weeks until birth.
Speaker 1:The beginnings of this concept of how these environmental impacts can affect a fetus through the biological changes in the mother which then affect the fetus that started off as a theory by someone named David Barker in the 1980s and they called it the Barker hypothesis. This Barker hypothesis later came to be known as prenatal programming, which is the term I like, and it's also known as DOHAD, which is developmental origins of health and disease. Barker came up with this hypothesis because he was researching a link that he found between low birth weight and the risk of coronary heart disease in adulthood, and he was researching a link that he found between low birth weight and the risk of coronary heart disease in adulthood, and he was looking back at historical data, and that data showed some geographical patterns. So areas that he saw with poor social conditions and higher infant mortality rates also had correlations for increased coronary heart disease later in life. They also saw this in the Spanish Civil War. People born in famine conditions had a significantly higher risk of coronary heart disease later in life, which was some validation for the hypothesis. And then we've also talked about the Holocaust survivors and their children, and children whose mothers were pregnant with them during the Quebec ice storm.
Speaker 1:Importantly for us is this can come back to the death as a stress model, specifically in a relationship to psychopathologies and I'm not saying psychopath, I'm just saying psychopathologies disorders that children can experience during childhood and later in life. There are tons of them. Not all of them are fully understood. Not all of them have been fully proven. What has been well established is that this prenatal programming is a real thing. It's easier to determine prenatal programming with things like coronary heart disease or cortisol levels.
Speaker 1:It's harder to demonstrate a causal link between stressors experienced by the mother during pregnancy and specific psychological disorders. So they haven't quite got there yet from what I've read, but it makes sense that it occurs. They're confident that it occurs. They know what happens when a person is subject to long periods of increased stress without reprieve. We know what happens with children when they're young and they're faced with just a series of situations that trigger their fight or flight and they can neither flee nor fight right. They're left with dissociating, fawning, anything to try to escape the reality of what they're experiencing. Even less can a fetus escape the biological reality of the hormones that it's receiving, the increased cortisol that it's receiving, the activation of their mother's immune system. So they know that these effects occur. They haven't mapped out exactly what triggers which effect and because it is dependent upon that diathesis stress model, you can have the same environmental triggers that will produce different results, even in siblings, because the siblings have different DNA structure, right, and they're going to have different epigenetic responses to some degree.
Speaker 1:So the big takeaway from today is that understanding this prenatal programming concept is something that I hope will lead to changes in how you are conducting yourself with your co-parent if things are not going well. I also hope it's something that will encourage courts to be more proactive in dealing with stressors that are being imposed on mothers while they're pregnant, if those parents are within the jurisdiction of the court already for other custody and visitation matters. If you are a mother who's suffering from domestic violence, it is incredibly hard for you to know what to do, and there's no way that I can understand what you're going through. What I do want you to understand is that if you're stuck in a situation that's high conflict, with stressors being imposed on you by your partner because of the conflict that's affecting not only yourself if you're pregnant, but also your fetus, right, your unborn child is being affected by this as well. Your unborn child is being affected by this as well. If you are a partner who is imposing these stressors, if you're being abusive, if you're doing any of these coercive control dynamics that we've seen, then understand that you're not just harming her, you're harming the child as well.
Speaker 1:No-transcript. If it hasn't risen to the level of domestic violence, if it's just this ongoing toxic communication, these games that sometimes co-parents play together, if it's not the level of domestic abuse or coercive control, it's just a mutually toxic relationship where lots of co-parents play these unhelpful games, then understand they're not games. Understand that creating this environment, participating in it, letting it develop, not trying to stop it, can have negative consequences on your unborn child. Armed with information, it's my hope that people who have been engaging in these kinds of behaviors will stop. Sometimes we just need to have information about what really the consequences are, to understand why we need to stop, to give us that extra motivation to behave better, to communicate better, to reduce the toxicity, to reduce the inter-parental stress.
Speaker 1:Also, as I mentioned at the top, sometimes we can have adults with whom we interact who don't act the way we want them to, and it's not providing an excuse for their behavior. All adults are responsible for their own behavior, but it is possible that the adult with whom you're having conflict your co-parent may have some real biological underpinnings that they have difficulty controlling and which maybe they don't even understand. Sometimes, being able to understand the origin of some of these behaviors can help you understand that it's really not you. You know it could be anybody in your position who would be receiving the same kind of toxic interaction. Sometimes, knowing that it's not you can help you feel better about the situation, to not wonder if you're the cause, and it can help you have some confidence in seeking the help that you need to try to help the other parent.
Speaker 1:In our Co-Parent Academy one of our principles is that it's every parent's obligation to do everything they can to help their co-parent be a better parent. Sometimes that means taking into consideration the deficiencies of your co-parent and not adding things on, not adding that little extra bit that is unnecessary in your communication or in your decisions. That you do because you kind of don't care anymore and you know maybe it's going to trigger the other parent and you kind of like getting at them. If you can understand that they're not fully in charge of how they're responding, sometimes in part because of what happened to them before they were even born, that that may give you a little more impetus to not add that extra that you know is going to lead to increased conflict.
Speaker 1:If you're the parent who, if you stop and think about it, is creating some of this unnecessary conflict, maybe it helps you to understand that maybe some of what you're feeling, some of these out-of-control feelings that maybe sometimes you have, are related to things that happened before you were even born.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means that you have an obligation, since you're a parent to try harder to mitigate some of those effects that you weren't responsible for, but you're given the challenge of rising above some of those effects that you are now suffering from in order to make sure that your children have the best experience that they can on this earth. So that's it for today. Thank you for staying with me during this kind of long, wonkish conversation, but I think it's really important to give us some additional perspective about where conflict comes from and what conflict does to our kids. Next week we'll get into stressors that are imposed on children after they're born, how their emotional brain develops in response to that environment, and then we'll be moving on towards attachment as we go. So thank you very much. Hope you have a great week.