Words have an incredible power of lifting us up and beating us down, wounding us or soothing us. Verbal abuse and aggression can be a part of friendship or an intimate relationship but it may also show up in case of children. Here’s the science behind what verbal abuse can do to your child. Verbal aggression can completely change the structure of the child’s developing brain. When a child is verbally abused, as a way to adapt to the negative enviroment, the child’s brain goes into survival mode, retooling itself so as to deal with deprivation and stress. Studies identify the most affected areas of the brain as the corpus callosum (accountable for transferring sensory, motor, and cognitive information between the brain hemispheres), the hippocampus (regulates emotions), and the frontal cortex (decision-making and thought creation). Another study suggests correlation between verbal abuse and alterations in the brain’s gray matter. Verbal aggression has a greater ...