Understanding the Impact of Trauma on Behavior

This enforced time alone has me watching both archived and new webinars. This one by Barbara Kaiser through Early Childhood Investigations is particularly pertinent as it addresses trauma. The webinar is entitled Understanding the Impact of Trauma on Behavior and runs about 90 minutes. You can register and watch the webinar here. Many programs are now trying to be trauma sensitive or trauma informed. This is in recognition that the lives of many of our children are subject to incredible perceived challenges. Children who are exposed to these ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) tend to struggle in school. While the target audience is teachers and caregivers of preschool, the webinar is appropriate for everyone.

Before discussing trauma, she talks about the adults. Adults who care for or teach children need to build their personal resilience because it is hard to be around struggling youth. Common phrases we hear are compassion fatigue and secondary trauma stress. By opening with the importance of caring for yourself, she highlights that if you are not in a good emotional state, you will not be able to help children who are not in a good emotional state.

Some of the ACEs that Barbara describes include abuse, neglect and dysfunction such as divorce, parental (or other child) mental illness, substance abuse. Risk factors also include having a parent in jail, poverty and poor attachment. She gives a good description of an assortment of challenges that students may face and the way they react to them. She includes disaster effect in her description. CoVid19 certainly falls into the category of a disaster that has upended children's lives- school is canceled, day cares are closed, parents are working from home or are isolating.

One important consideration she discusses is how trauma and chronic stress change the brain and our genes. We like to think of our genes as stable and unchangeable. Yes, mutations may happen, but that is the exception. Random mutations do occur at the somatic cell level all the time, but this is not what we are talking about. When we expose cells to high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, they change how cells work over time. People become locked into the fight or flight cycle with the amygdala primed to be in charge. The thinking brain is turned off. Since we as teachers need to interact with the thinking brain in order to teach, we need to discover strategies to help students deescalate their stress.

She offers many suggestions for working with trauma exposed children including providing consistency and routines and being flexible. A child may truly be incapable of dealing with something and then safe alternatives need to be found. (I worked in a program where we visited Santa- some kids needed to be nowhere near Santa and that was ok.)

A great overview with many positive suggestions.