For many kids who suffer from trauma, it’s not one event. Often, it’s ongoing abuse or neglect. This could be violence at home or in their neighborhood. For some, it’s not having a place to sleep. Trauma affects the way kids act in classrooms. Children who’ve gone through trauma are good at hiding pain. Instead, it comes through in ways that look like misbehavior or even ADHD.
When kids learn not to trust adults, they struggle to connect with teachers. They don’t ask for help. They may be jumpy, always looking out for danger. Because it can seem like they’re acting out, schools are quick to punish them. Instead, these kids need teachers to show that you understand how they’re feeling. One way to help is by naming the feeling you see the child expressing. It’s okay if you’re wrong. They’ll probably correct you.
Babies learn to calm themselves when grown-ups soothe them. If a child never had an adult soothe them, they can get to school age unable to cope with big feelings. They’ll need help from a teacher to calm down before they learn to do it themselves.
Traumatized kids often see things in the worst light. They may think they’re bad kids. Or that people are out to get them. They may be so afraid of making mistakes that they won’t try an activity at all. They need help to see that that they’re good kids who deserve to do well.
Kids with trauma can have trouble focusing and thinking things through. They may also act out for attention, even negative attention. It can help when teachers give a lot of positive attention instead. That includes giving them lots of kindness and loving care “just because,” not just when they do something right.
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We tend to think of trauma as the result of a frightening and upsetting event. But many children experience trauma through ongoing exposure, throughout their early development, to abuse, neglect, homelessness, domestic violence, or violence in their communities. And it’s clear thatchronic trauma can cause serious problems with learning and behavior.
Trauma is particularly challenging for educators to address because kids often don’t express the distress they’re feeling in a way that’s easily recognizable — and they may mask their pain with behavior that’s aggressive or off-putting. As Nancy Rappaport, MD, a child and adolescentpsychiatrist who focuses on mental health issues in schools, puts it, “They are masters at making sure you do not see them bleed.”
Identifying the symptoms of trauma in the children can help educators understand these confusing behaviors. And it can help avoid misdiagnosis, as these symptoms can mimic other problems, including ADHD and other behavior disorders.
In brief, the obstacles to learning experienced by these children include:
Trouble forming relationships with teachers
Poor self-regulation
Negative thinking
Hypervigilance
Executive function challenges
Trauma and trouble forming bonds
Children who have been neglected or abused have problems forming relationships with teachers, a necessary first step in a successful classroom experience. They’ve learned to be wary of adults, even those who appear to be reliable, since they’ve been ignored or betrayed by those they have depended on.
“These kids don’t have the context to ask for help,” notes Dr. Rappaport, a school consultant and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “They don’t have a model for an adult recognizing their needs and giving them what they need.”
Many of these children haven’t been able to develop secure attachments to the adults in their lives, adds Jamie Howard, PhD, a clinical psychologist and head of the Trauma and Resilience Service at the Child Mind Institute. They need help to let other adults into their lives. “Kids who’ve never developed that early template that you can trust people, that you are lovable and that people will take care of you,” Dr. Howard explains, “need support to form that kind of relationship.”
One of the challenges in giving that support is that when kids misbehave, our schools often use disciplinary systems that involve withdrawing attention and support, rather than addressing their problems. Schools have very little patience for kids who provoke and push away adults who try to help them.
Instead of suspending children, Dr. Rappaport argues, schools need to work with them on changing their behavior. When a student is acting up in class, she explains, teachers need to recognize the powerful feelings they are expressing, if inappropriately.
Rather than jumping right into the behavior plan — deducting points or withdrawing privileges or suspending — Dr. Rappaport stresses the importance of acknowledging the emotion and trying to identify it. “I can see that you are REALLY angry that Andrew took the marker you wanted!” she suggests. “If you’re wrong about what the student is upset about, he’s likely to correct you.”
Acknowledging and naming an emotion helps children move towards expressing it in a more appropriate way. Communicating that you “get” them is the necessary first step, she explains, to helping kids learn to express themselves in ways that don’t alienate and drive away people who can help them.
Poor self-regulation
Traumatized children often have trouble managing strong emotions. As babies and toddlers, children learn to calm and soothe themselves by being calmed and soothed by the adults in their lives, Dr. Howard notes. If they haven’t had that experience, because of neglect, “that lack of a soothing, secure attachment system contributes to their chronic dysregulation.”
In the classroom, teachers need to support and coach these children in ways to calm themselves and manage their emotions. “We need to be partners in managing their behavior,” Dr. Rappaport explains. “Co-regulation comes before self-regulation. We need to help them get the control they need to change the channel when they’re upset.” They need coaching and practice at de-escalating when they feel overwhelmed, she adds.
Negative thinking
Another challenge to traumatized kids is that they develop the belief that they’re bad, and what’s happened to them is their fault. This leads to the expectation that people are not going to like them or treat them well. As Dr. Howard puts it, “I’m a bad kid. Why would I do well in school? Bad kids don’t do well in school.”
Traumatized kids also tend to develop what Dr. Howard calls a “hostile attribution bias” — the idea that everyone is out to get them. “So if a teacher says, ‘Sit down in your seat,” they hear it as, ‘SIT DOWN IN YOUR SEAT!’” she explains. “They hear it as exaggerated and angry and unfair. So they’ll act out really quickly with irritability.”
As Dr. Rappaport puts it: “They see negative where we see neutral.” To counter this negative thinking, these students a narrative about themselves that helps them understand that they’re not “bad kids.” And learning to recognize their negative patterns of thought, like black and white thinking, is a step towards being able to change those patterns.
Dr. Rappaport notes that children from abusive homes are sometimes unable to participate in classroom activities because they are paralyzed by fear of making a mistake, and that can make them appear to beoppositional. “A mistake that might seem trivial to us becomes magnified,” she explains, “if their experience has been that minor mistakes incurred adult anger or punishment.”
They need not only support to have incremental successes they can build on in the classroom, but help to see that in this setting, making a mistake is considered a necessary part of learning.
Hypervigilance
One of the classic symptoms of trauma is hyper-vigilance, which means being overly alert to danger. “It’s physiological hyper-arousal,” explains Dr. Howard. “These kids are jumpy, they have an exaggerated startle response. They can have some big, out-of-control seeming behaviors, because their fight or flight response has gone off.”
This can look like hyperactivity, she adds, leading kids who have been traumatized to be misdiagnosed with ADHD. Being chronically agitated can lead to difficulty with sleeping and chronic irritability.
In workshops, Dr. Rappaport coaches teachers on how to help kids to settle down when something in the classroom triggers an emotional outburst. When a child is escalating, the key, she says, is to “match their affect, but in a controlled way.”
The goal is to connect to their big feeling. “If you can connect with what they’re trying to tell you, they may settle. It can work even if you just make a guess — you don’t have to be right, they can correct you.”
Executive function challenges
Chronic trauma affects children’s memory, their ability to pay attention, plan, think things through, and other executive functions. Kids who haveADHD as well as trauma may be especially impaired in these skills.
Difficulty planning impacts not only completing tasks in school, but a child’s ability to plan his behavior, rather than acting impulsively, and deciding on the best way to communicate his needs and feelings.
One of the things that tends to upset kids who’ve been traumatized is difficulty predicting the future — not knowing what is coming is unsettling for children and creates anxiety. These kids can benefit, Dr. Rappaport notes, from repeated dry runs of what’s coming up and what they should expect.
Another executive function that may be weak is the ability to self-narrate — to mentally talk themselves through what they need to do as they are carrying out a task. It’s a skill young children learn from listening to their parents talk to them when they are babies, and, she notes, if they haven’t had the experience they may need help developing the skill.
Focus on positive attention
In addition to connecting with kids who’ve been traumatized, and helping them build missing skills, Dr. Rappaport emphasizes the importance of giving them as much positive attention as possible.
Kids who have experienced chronic neglect tend to be better at getting attention by provoking the adults they depend on than by complying with expectations. “Negative attention is fast, predictable and efficient,” she notes. “We need to make positive attention as fast, predictable and efficient.”
But she adds that positive attention includes not only praising them for desired behavior but expressing warmth and kindness that aren’t necessarily earned.
Surprising kids with “random acts of kindness” can help wean them from habits of acting out to get attention. “When a kid is acting out and sucking the oxygen out of a classroom,” she notes, “some teachers have found it works to set their phones to buzz every 5 minutes to give the kid positive attention.”
Dr. Rappaport offers tools for understanding ahd managing disruptive behavior in the classroom in her book, The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, written with behavioral analyst Jessica Minahan.
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James Donaldson is a Washington State University graduate (’79). After an outstanding basketball career with WSU, he went on to play professional basketball in the NBA with the Seattle Supersonics, San Diego/L.A. Clippers, Dallas Mavericks, New York Knicks, and Utah Jazz. He also played for several teams in the European Leagues in Spain, Italy, and Greece, and he toured with The Harlem Globetrotters to wrap up his career. James was an NBA All-Star in 1988 while playing center for the Dallas Mavericks. In 2006, James was inducted into the Pac-10 Sports Hall of Fame and also the Washington State University Athletic Hall of Fame. In 2010, James was elected as a board member for the NBA Retired Players Association.
James frequently conducts speaking engagements (motivational, inspirational, educational) for organizations, schools, and youth groups.
In 2010, James was the recipient of the NBA Legends of Basketball ABC Award, awarded for outstanding contributions in Athletics–Business–Community.
He believes in being a role model for success and professionalism to the scores of young people to whom he devotes so much of his time. He currently serves on several boards and committees and is a member of many organizations.
James believes in developing relationships that create a “Win-Win” environment for everyone involved, and in being the best he can be!
For more information about James Donaldson or to request he speak at your event, contact him at:
James Donaldson is the author of “Standing Above The Crowd” and “Celebrating Your Gift of Life” and founder of the Your Gift of Life Foundation which focuses on mental health awareness and suicide prevention, especially pertaining to our school aged children and men.
If you’re interested in having James come and speak to your group of young adults, business entrepreneurs, aspiring political and community leaders, and athletic teams, please contact him at jamesd@yourgiftoflife.org and or leave a personal message for him at 1-800-745-3161. Keep up with him and read about how he is reaching out and making a difference in the lives of so many around the world at www.yourgiftoflife.org
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