There are things that I wish you understood about my kid. I realize that he is one of 29 other children in your classroom and you really don’t need one more thing on your plate. But, the more I understand about trauma, the more I realize how much it affected my entire classroom. The extent of my training for childhood trauma was the mandatory reporter powerpoint slides sandwiched between blood-borne pathogen training and computer lab rules. I wish I had understood what trauma really meant for all the kids in my class; because we all know that trauma and behaviors are never ‘self-contained’.
As a former teacher, I heard lots of statistics about how my students early childhood affected their learning, but knowing did not help grade multitudes of papers or manage growing classroom numbers. I would have agreed that most of the statistics I heard matched what I experienced day to day. I would be able to tell you about the children in my class and the struggles they had. I could tell you about the sad stories, the failing marks, and the brokenness; I could not tell you what I could do to help. My whole day seemed to be spent reacting to behaviors and trying to put out fires. I am writing this to help teachers understand how to become First Responders to our children with trauma, instead of First Reactors.
Let’s start in the jail. Every month, I teach classes to male and female inmates. I have learned much about childhood trauma and the correlation between ACEs (adverse childhood events) and inmates. They say that every inmate lies…altered truths are spoken on a minute by minute basis. But for some reason, when we sit together in a crammed and stuffy room with chairs lined in rows and talk about their childhood, I see more truth than I care to know.
He was tatted up and his face was lined with years of hard living. I noticed his knuckle tattoos as he handed me his pencil (these must be collected because they can become weapons).
I lied to you Mrs. Stacey, he mumbled as I walked past.
I turned back towards him.
“You lied to me?” I asked. Honestly, I wasn’t sure where this was going, and his statement stopped me in my tracks.
I lied on my ACEs quiz. (The ACEs quiz is a tool to measure adverse childhood events).
Why? I asked, because lying in this instance made no sense.
“I lied because I didn’t want you to think poorly of my mother”
And just like that I was hit with a revelation about childhood trauma. It is argued that children are resilient, and that tough things happen to kids and they should pull themselves up and move on. I thought about how this message actually teaches children of trauma to take on their abuse and suffering as their own. This man had been abused as a child, and he was going to protect his mother by taking the blame for every bad thing that had ever happened to him. As a middle-aged man, he believed that he deserved the physical abuse, the neglect, and the violence he witnessed; he fully believed that he was to blame.
“He whispered, “I was not an easy child, she didn’t want to hurt me. I deserved it.”
I replied, “Do you think that all children deserve abuse, or only you? Every child is worthy of being loved without being hurt.”
As a teacher, I was a First Reactor. I could sticker chart and frowny face the heck out of my class, and for the most part it worked. But it wasn’t for the ‘most part’ kids, that I needed help managing. It was that other 30 percent that I failed to reach. As an adoptive mother, a nurse that visits jail inmates and a former teacher, here are the things that I wished I had known;
Children blame themselves. It’s easier for children from hard places or situations to blame themselves for the trauma, because it’s preferable to facing the reality of parents that have let them down. Trauma causes children to feel fear and shame. They are afraid because they either believe there is something wrong with themselves or their parents could not keep them safe and love them. It’s easier for a child to believe they are the problem. When you punish my child with a trauma background, he will spiral into shame and it can become toxic. Most behaviors come from a state of stress, so reacting, and punishing in the heat of the moment only increases the stress level. On a deep level, he believes destructive messages and beliefs about the world and himself. At his core, he hears the message – I’m bad, I’m not loveable, I’m worthless.
Children will do things to avoid the feeling of shame. In your classroom, it may look like –
- Acting tough – “I don’t care”
- Lying – “She’s lying…I didn’t do it”
- Making excuses – “It wasn’t my fault, He made me do it”
- Minimising their behavior – “It wasn’t that bad, she’s exaggerating”
- Expressing rage – “You always blame me…you want me to be unhappy.”
“Deep down my child feels like a bad kid at times, and this drives many of his behaviors.”
He is trying to prove that he is unlovable, you reaffirm this if you react and punish. Children from trauma will set off a trigger in us because we fear we are going to lose control of our classroom. We interpret their behavior as a sign of disrespect and that the behaviors are about us. We are emotionally hard-wired to drop the hammer and react to this kid. We are responding from a place of fear and we end up matching his behavior with a punishment.
If we start with the premise that a child is going to pop off and misbehave as a means to communicate, we will be able to respond appropriately. The answer and the key is RELATIONSHIP! If you are a reactor, you will mess up the solution. When you understand root cause, you will respond to the behavior knowing it’s not “what’s wrong with you?”, it’s “what’s happened to you?”. It is a paradigm shift in the teaching model – we must deal with what is below the surface, not the behavior. As my husband, a high school science teacher, likes to say, “Pushing down the tip of the iceberg, may make behaviors go away, but it doesn’t cure the problem.”
