?It does not happen very often where I get excited about an assigned reading, but I was not able to put down ‘The Boy Who Was Raised as A Dog” by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz. The diversity of the types of trauma and the effects it has on the development of a child’s brain, is astounding. Perry sets out a great deal of scientific understanding of brain development and the importance of nurturing young children through the cases he writes about. Perry’s example of looking into the families for answers, gives insightful examples of how abuse and neglect changes the physiology of how the brain functions. Neuroscience is considered increasingly important to psychiatry, and Perry explains how to make the link between the scientific knowledge and clinical treatment. The links he was able to make was amazing, because it made so much sense. The brain develops sequentially, and rapidly in the first years of life, Perry explains why extremely young children are at such great risk of suffering lasting effects of trauma: their brains are still developing. In Perry’s cases he writes about, all feature people, who as children, had what should have been normal experiences during childhood replaced by stressful events. The violence and neglect Perry’s clients experienced, put parts of the brain on high alert. Some areas of the brain stopped growing and became frozen in time. I never thought of the physical effects (high heart rate, anxiety, etc) the child was experiencing in correlation to their brain development or lack thereof. Sometimes the only thing I was able to see was a negative behavior, or lack of performance as an end result of whatever their experience was. When faced with a child who is escalated, non- responsive or functions at a low level, it is hard to go beyond the obvious behavior one is trying to manage and a lack of an outcome. Often when met with challenging children teachers don’t get always get informatio