Early Neglect May Cause Teenage Troubles

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A damaged stress response • Burned out parents • Depressed teens • Helping children thrive

When Nicole B. Perry was an undergraduate student researching how children respond to emotional situations, she was struck by the tremendous variability in their responses.

“That experience fundamentally shaped the way I think about development,” said Perry, now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “It highlighted for me the importance of the foundational emotional skills that are established early in life and set the stage for lifelong emotional adjustment.”

Unfortunately, some children experience deprivation in attention and care, which can prevent them from developing these foundational skills. While some children experience deprivation in orphanages, other children may be neglected or experience violence as a result of their mothers or fathers suffering from parental burnout. These early life experiences—including trauma, inattention, and neglect—affect emotional processing, social interactions, and mental and cognitive health for years to come, into adolescence and beyond. As researchers try to pin down these effects, they are also searching for the best ways to intervene—with children or parents—and the most impactful timing to support emotional development.

“Healthy emotional functioning is at the core of human adaptation,” said Perry. “It allows us to build and maintain relationships, cope with frustration, persist toward our goals, and ultimately supports our mental health and well-being.”

A damaged stress response

The effects of early childhood neglect were famously revealed in studies of children who endured the appalling conditions of orphanages in 1980s Romania. Children who experienced more than 6 months in the orphanages had significantly impaired social and cognitive function in adolescence, as well as emotional problems (Sonuga-Barke et al., 2017).

Related content: Teaching: Ethical Research to Help Romania’s Abandoned Children

“Studying children who experienced profound deprivation early in life but were later adopted into nurturing, supportive families allows us to isolate the effects of early caregiving in a way that is rarely possible in human research,” said Perry. “This research provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand how early environments become biologically embedded and continue to influence emotional functioning years later.”

In a 2026 Current Directions in Psychological Science review, Perry detailed how children who were institutionalized as babies and then adopted into loving homes continued to show hormonal, neurological, and behavioral effects of that early deprivation through young adulthood. The children came from many different countries, but the institutional environments were often similar to the Romanian orphanages, with inconsistent caregiving and limited attention given to the children.

Perry’s review focused on how cortisol levels and stress reactivity were affected. Limited or inconsistent care can signal ongoing threat or uncertainty and lead to repeated activation of the stress response. This can result in chronically elevated cortisol levels, which can have harmful effects on the brain and body. To combat these issues, the body responds by reducing cortisol, leading to a blunted stress response.

“If a child’s everyday environment is consistently stressful, it may not be advantageous to mount a full stress response day after day,” said Perry. “Instead, the early developing system appears to calibrate to that stressful environment as the norm.”

This blunted response may cause emotional and behavioral issues in childhood, even after children are adopted into loving homes.

Perry hoped that puberty may be a time of recalibration, with cortisol responses becoming stronger. Teenagers who had been adopted into loving families exhibited similar cortisol levels as those raised by their birth families. (Cortisol levels did not change during puberty for youth raised by their birth families.) However, Perry found that this did not translate into improved emotional and mental health for the adopted teenagers.

“Instead, [adopted] youth who showed the greatest increases in cortisol reactivity during puberty also reported more emotional problems and displayed more anxious behavior,” than non-adopted youth, she said. “Even more interesting, those associations were still present several years later.”

It seems as though cortisol catching up during adolescence is not enough to fix the system completely. Perry noted this may be due to leftover effects of a system developed under extreme stress, or that a more responsive cortisol system may make teenagers temporarily more sensitive or may require time for the teens to adapt to it.

“Puberty represents a period of tremendous biological change, and we’re just beginning to understand how those changes unfold following early adversity,” she said.

Burned out parents

Isabelle Roskam, a professor at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, worked for a long time with children having behavioral issues. But a few years ago, she started to notice parents with a different kind of problem.

“It was not, ‘I came in because my child has an issue and I want to fix it,’ but ‘I have an issue. My children are well, but I am suffering as a parent,’” she recalled.

The way the parents described their problems and the expressions they used (“I’m at the end of my rope”) was similar to the language people use to describe burnout at work. As the standards for parenting changed and the pressure to be the perfect parent increased, more parents were feeling overwhelmed and suffering from exhaustion.

“The story is different for all parents, but the process is always the same,” said Roskam. “You have too much stress for too long, so it’s chronic stress, and you don’t have the resources to cope with these stressors. When you have such an important imbalance, you feel completely exhausted.”

At the same time that parental burnout became more widely recognized, the concept of parenthood regret entered the picture. Parenthood regret arises from regret over the decision to have children and feeling unfulfilled by the situation. Some studies found higher levels of parental burnout among parents who also expressed parenthood regret.

To understand how the concepts are related—and how they affect children—Roskam performed two studies: a cross-sectional survey of almost 1,000 Polish parents and a longitudinal study of nearly 1,500 French- and English-speaking parents. The results, published in a 2026 paper in Clinical Psychological Science, revealed that most parents (69%–79%) did not experience either parental burnout or parenthood regret, but 11% to 18% experienced high regret and low burnout, 6% to 8% experienced low regret and high burnout, and 3% experienced both. Parents with parental burnout had higher levels of escape ideation, parental neglect, and violence than parents experiencing regret.

Roskam was not surprised that the two concepts have different consequences.

“My intuition was that burnout is a syndrome, so it’s something which is problematic for mental health issues. It’s like a disease, a severe distress. But regret is an emotion,” she said. “It’s not a disease.… It’s painful, but it’s something normal.”

Parental burnout, however, has more dire consequences.

“When the parent is really affected in his or her mental health, that means that his or her way to interact with the child has become problematic,” Roskam said. “It has severe consequences for the child. For example, being more neglectful or violent toward the child, but also having suicidal ideations.”

Children of parents experiencing burnout notice the change and blame themselves. Some internalize and withdraw, become anxious, or develop sleep problems. Other kids externalize and lash out, becoming more provocative. When parents neglect their children, they don’t look at them and don’t play with them. Children react with bad behavior to be noticed and receive attention.

“They provoke the parent because they want to exist for the parent,” said Roskam. “Even if it’s a negative interaction, it’s better than neglect and ignorance. It’s quite painful for the children.”

Fortunately, Roskam has found that interventions can be very effective. In another study, she tested two kinds of 8-week interventions: one led by burnout experts that focused on restoring the balance between stressors and resources, and one led by experts in active listening that focused on helping parents share their difficulties and learn to see themselves as capable to deal with them. Both reduced parental burnout, as well as negative emotions, parental neglect, and parental violence (Brianda et al., 2020).

The biggest issue is getting parents to admit they need help.

“We want to alleviate the taboo and make it possible for parents to say, ‘I regret or I feel exhausted, so I need help,’” said Roskam. “We have a culture of high standards about parenting and self-reliance, and you have to be the best parent. Failure in parenting is difficult to admit.”

Roskam said that working in groups of eight to 10 parents is particularly helpful.

“It alleviates guilt and shame and difficult feelings because you meet other parents also expressing exhaustion, distancing from children, saturation, feelings of being fed up with parenting, and a contrast with their previous self,” she said. “It helps you to see that you are not the bad parent that you thought, but just a parent in a situation which is overwhelming.”

She wants parents to stop feeling like they need to be self-reliant and to seek help when they need it.

“In child psychology, in parenting psychology, the focus is always on child well-being,” she said. “I am concerned with that because I think that the child cannot be fulfilled if the parent is suffering. We must consider that these two are a single entity and you cannot care for the child if you do not care for the parents.”

Depressed teens

Parents’ mental health can also affect children’s mental health in their teenage years. In another 2026 Clinical Psychological Science paper, both maternal depression and childhood trauma, including parental neglect, were associated with depression during adolescence (Schlechter et al., 2026).

Related Research Topic: Childhood and Adolescent Mental Health

The paper examined how depression persists or fluctuates throughout childhood and adolescence. Whereas some people exhibit chronic depressive symptoms over years (trait-like), others experience symptoms in response to life circumstances (state-like). The study examined trait and state components of depression in nearly 15,000 participants at 10 timepoints between ages 11 and 26.

“If trait variance increases over time, this could indicate that depressive symptoms are becoming more entrenched during development,” Pascal Schlechter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster, and his coauthors wrote.

They found that although trait variance increased during adolescence, state variance decreased. Whereas symptoms of trait depression suggest stable vulnerabilities, such as biological predispositions, symptoms of state depression suggest environmental causes, such as experiencing trauma, that may be easier to prevent.

“State factors represent the part of depression that is changing over time, which by merit of reflecting less entrenched symptoms is more likely to constitute an amendable intervention target,” Schlechter wrote. “Examining predictors of the state factors thereby enables us to pinpoint the developmental timing of risk factors that predict the changing aspects of depression.”

Parental relationships were one such risk factor that influenced state depression in teens. Maternal depression at age 11 predicted state depression in teenagers, and a poor parent–child relationship at age 14 predicted state depression in later adolescence. Additionally, experiencing childhood trauma, such as neglect, was related to state depression in late adolescence.

The work suggests targeting depression at younger ages (before it becomes persistent and trait-like) may be beneficial.

“The greater role of state factors in early adolescent depression suggests that depression is more modifiable at younger ages,” Schlechter wrote.

Additionally, the work reinforces the need to help parents who are struggling, as their mental health has long-term effects on their children’s mental health.

“These findings underscore the need for identification and treatment of depression in parents, as well as parental psychoeducation, to increase awareness of how parental factors relate to the well-being of their children,” Schlechter wrote.

Helping children thrive

“The best intervention is prevention,” said Perry. But for children who have already experienced adversity and trauma, “one of the most hopeful messages from this research is that early adversity does not completely determine a child’s future. Even after experiencing profound deprivation, many children show remarkable resilience when they are placed in stable, loving, and responsive families.”

She hopes that more-targeted interventions will come from identifying the biological and behavioral mechanisms that link childhood experiences to adolescent emotional and mental health, underscoring the need for sustained investment in social, behavioral, and cross-cultural science across the globe.

“Ultimately, I hope this research shifts the conversation from asking, ‘What damage did early adversity cause?’ to asking, ‘When are the opportunities to help children thrive?’” she said. “That’s the question that motivates my work.”

The need for research like this stands in stark contrast to divestments in social and behavioral sciences in many parts of the world today. See APS’s Act Now page for more.

The Child Helpline International Foundation (CHI) is available for children and young people in need of care and protection. Find your local child helpline to learn about resources available to you. 

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