Passports to Success

Assuring Positive Educational Experiences
For Children in Out-of-home Care


Module 4: Page 6 of 8

What are some ways in which trauma can affect a child's development?

The following video and the information below it review the many ways in which trauma has an impact child development.




Educational Specialist Laura Phipps describes the effect of trauma on the brain, and what this often looks like in terms of children's behavior.

A comprehensive review can be found in the resources listed at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.


Expand each section below to read more about the impact of trauma in each area for a child.

Sense of self and world view

Children’s first sense of who they are and what the world is like comes from the relationship with their primary caregivers. If that relationship is characterized by unpredictable responses and threats of psychological or physical harm, they may develop an identity that says “I am incompetent, helpless, and worthless; I am unlovable”. And they may develop an internal view of the world as a dangerous place that they are powerless to influence.

Emotions

A traumatized child may have limited ability to identify and understand her feelings or to describe them to others to get her needs met. She hasn’t had the opportunity to learn how to regulate her emotions and calm herself down. That can keep her in a persistent state of fear, inordinately vigilant to possible threats and unable to make judgments about what is and isn’t an actual threat. Everything is a potential threat. Because her memory functions have not been adequately integrated, she may retain the sensory memory of an event but not the actual explicit memory, so intense feelings are disconnected from events and free-floating. A small change or incidental trigger in her environment can cue an intense emotional response that looks like an immense over-reaction to an observer. Or she may close herself down, to avoid experiencing the frightening and painful emotions.

Relationships

Relational templates in a traumatized child may have been altered. The child can have difficulty understanding and caring about the feelings of others. Not having a sense of who he himself is, he can have difficulty understanding another person’s perspective; and his perceptions about what others think and feel are distorted by his negative world view. Relationships can be a source of fear, confusion and potential danger; and trusting others can be too big of a risk based on what they've experienced in the past.

Executive functions

Trauma can impair a child’s ability to understand the relationship between cause and effect, problem-solve, establish goals and carry out plans, organize, and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information.

Memory

There are a number of ways in which trauma can impair a child’s memory functions.

  • Memory can be temporarily compromised by such things as anxiety and sleep deprivation, which many children in out-of-home care experience.
  • Memory can be compromised by a hyper-vigilant state: a child may be so focused on reading cues of possible danger in his environment that he cannot absorb, store and retrieve new information.
  • A child’s actual short-term memory function can be compromised by altered pathways in the brain, making it difficult for him to remember verbal directions, particularly when they describe sequential tasks, e.g., “Do A, then B, then C”. 
  • Finally, the development of sequential memory may have been impaired, making it difficult for him to organize information sequentially and therefore difficult for him to read, write and communicate. 

Language and communication skills

Trauma can disrupt a child’s ability to use language to communicate and to connect words to experience. Trauma can also make it difficult for a child to process verbal information and to use language to solve problems.

Adaptability

Traumatized children can have difficulty adapting to their environment. Even small changes in their environment, such as a minor change in routine, can be a source of great stress for them. Transitions – beginnings and endings – are also stressful, because any changes are perceived as a possible source of danger.

Behavior

At their core, traumatized children can feel very vulnerable and powerless. The behaviors that they developed – successfully - to survive in a harmful environment can become locked in as the default behavior when those threats no longer exist. Behaviors that were adaptive in the environment in which they were created are counter-productive in the school environment. The child, however, may be unable to make this judgment, and may continue to use the same strategies, particularly when under stress. With an altered baseline for arousal, small triggers can produce significant stress. You will learn more about trauma-influenced behaviors in the Behavior Management module.

 

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