ABSTRACT
Early stress becomes deeply embedded in the child’s neurobiology, with an astonishing range of long-term effects on cognition, emotion and behavior…Are those effects entirely maladaptive, or do they reflect a more complex balance of costs and benefits? … [T]he field is undergoing a conceptual revolution, as traditional approaches founded on notions of “toxic stress” are revised in light of the potential of early stress to shift the developing organism along alternative adaptive trajectories.
