Originally published by Ransom For Israel

I hate the first week of school. It fills me with anxiety and dread. I once loved the smell of new crayons and was excited over the new backpacks and folders. Now I worry. I parent children from hard places; children who have experienced trauma. I’ve been lucky the last two years. I had a teacher that “got it”. I had a teacher that listened to me and studied up on trauma and it’s effects on the child’s brain. She understood that unaddressed trauma generates lifelong impacts that can end in early death.

Sound extreme?

It’s not.

Parenting my child is life or death and I decided to write this post to explain. I was once a 3rd grade teacher, so I know that you might be thinking this is all a bit dramatic. However, I am now the mother of 7 and I live with the effects of childhood trauma every day. These are the things that I understand as a mother, a former educator and a nurse.

Trauma impacts the children in your classroom.

We have sanitized trauma in our lives. Opioid crisis. Food insecurity. Sirens and fights in the night. We don’t really think about the smallest victims. We don’t read about the child hiding in the backroom during a drug bust, or the baby left in an apartment tended by his 11 year old sibling with only ramen and cereal to eat. Instead we protect anonymity to the detriment of these children who end up in the classroom struggling with a story that is never told. We end up treating the traumatized by ignoring the trauma.

If you are a teacher, you WILL teach children who have been traumatized. The CDC ACE study tells us that more than 50% of students in the classroom have experienced one or more adverse childhood events (ACE). The time in life when the brain is the most sensitive to experience is infancy and childhood.

In the CDC’s ACE Study, the ten types of childhood adversity measured were:

  • physical, sexual, verbal abuse
  • physical and emotional neglect
  • a parent who’s an alcoholic (or addicted to other drugs) or diagnosed with a mental illness
  • witnessing a mother who experiences abuse
  • losing a parent to abandonment or divorce
  • a family member in jail

 

Trauma Changes the Brain

Studies show chronic stress or unaddressed ACEs can change the chemical and physical structures of the brain. In the classroom, children can display traumatic stress through aggression, anxiety, defiance, perfectionism, and withdrawal. And here’s the biggie, signs of trauma often times look very similar to ADD, ADHD, ODD and autism spectrum disorder.

Think on this…inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive behavior may in fact mirror the effects of trauma or adversity. Children show their emotions through behavior.

What might seem like random, nonsensical or manipulative behaviors in a child, might actually be rooted in a space called ‘FEAR’ and pain. The emotional backpack they carry to school each day is one that they cannot set outside your classroom door, and it will remain heavy and forefront in their brain.

It’s important to understand that 25% to 50% of the students within your classroom, will be affected by adverse childhood events. Trauma undermines attention, executive functioning and working memory. When trauma causes emotional or psychological damage to children, they may adopt a set of behaviors or patterns of thinking that put them on a path for further trauma. Trauma begets trauma.

Read the full story at: Ransom For Israel