Kennard Principle

Definition

The recently disproven assumption that children recover more rapidly than adults suffering from the same type of brain lesion.

Current Knowledge

Initially proposed by Margaret Kennard in 1936 when studying primates, she found that motor impairment from unilateral lesions to the motor cortex was less severe in infants than in adults. This theory was generalized to humans in claiming that children would sustain less impairment and would recover more rapidly than adults if both sustained brain injury.

The initially widely accepted principle loses credibility as it was discovered that children with diffuse impairment did not recover more rapidly than their adult counterparts. Similarly, very young children did not recover as quickly as elderly adults did. In fact, younger children have greater difficulty with recovery of functions and have more developmental delays than older children. Prognosis for recovery is associated with existing cognitive skills as a foundation. Those...