Back to school season has a way of turning otherwise reasonable parents into amateur admissions officers. Suddenly we are comparing math programs, thinking about tutors, looking at extracurricular calendars, and wondering whether everyone else's fourth grader has already begun preparing for the SAT. There is a quiet pressure around parenting today that tells us our children should be above average at nearly everything. The problem, of course, is that “above average” stops meaning anything when we expect it from everybody.

There is something unsettling about imagining a five year old being evaluated to determine whether he might someday become unemployed. He is still trying to determine whether puddles are for walking around or jumping directly into. She wants to know why ice melts and why worms come out after it rains. Yet a policy discussion in the United Kingdom has raised exactly this question. With more than one million young people aged sixteen to twenty four reportedly outside employment or education, some policymakers argue that warning signs should be identified as early as primary school. I understand the urgency. A million disconnected young adults should concern us. But I think there is a significant difference between identifying a child as a future problem and noticing what that child needs today.

There are some research findings that should not make parents panic, but they should make us pay attention. In the study we discussed on the Celebrate Kids Podcast, researchers from Washington University School of Medicine and Princeton University examined how severe early life stress can produce lasting molecular changes in brain cells. The researchers described these changes as a kind of biological “scar,” affecting the way stress related systems may respond later in life. That is sobering. Abuse, domestic violence, household dysfunction, chronic fear, and other traumatic experiences do not simply disappear because a child gets older. The body remembers more than we once understood.