Fostering Resilience in Young Children
Trauma-Informed Speaking Builds a Better Tomorrow
Trauma is a pretty curious thing and it often molds us into the people we become as adults. However, trauma is not a deterministic destination for how your life turns out.
In fact, trauma is just one of many different factors that can influence our lifespans, both in good ways and bad. Developmental psychology, the branch of psychology associated with the general growth and lifespan of humanity, has always had a big place in my heart.
You see, I did my first master’s degree in it, and it required me to be heavily immersed with contemporary research, where most of it is implicated in various real-world contexts, such as our schools, our workplaces, and even our health outcomes.
As researchers Rice and Groves once noted,
“Trauma is an exceptional experience in which powerful and dangerous events overwhelm a person’s capacity to cope.”
Keeping this in mind, the children of today are facing things that a lot of us may have never imagined in our lifetime, whether it is the ongoing pandemic or some other problem that is wreaking havoc in that child’s life.
Either way, the capacity of coping varies from child to child, and it places quite a burden on our educators and fellow adults to help keep the future generation intact.
Even before the pandemic, there were likely children who were facing other kinds of trauma, such as those that operate on racial, cultural, and socioeconomic parameters. For example, maybe one child is persistently bullied by others online for how they dress.
Even so, many children haven’t always had the same access to mental health supports. As adults, being able to manage, process, and understand these emotions will help us in becoming more compassionate and empathetic leaders for the next generation.
What we need to know about trauma is it that is very much real. We can’t just forget what had conspired the previous day. We don’t do this as adults, so how are we expected to allow children to be the same?
Furthermore, trauma is recurring and is constantly in flux. In order to best understand the future, we have to put ourselves in their shoes and develop the self-awareness that we all have some form of biases, whether big or small.
None of us know everything about every single culture, language, social norm, or subject. We are constantly evolving and being aware of this will help you in addressing the future elephants in the room.
Finally, we need to understand that trauma can influence the way our brains are structured and organized. Think of our brains as being malleable and subject to change. This window of adjustability is narrowed when someone has trauma and it is never acknowledged, understood, or addressed.
Think of it this way: most kids have a hard time processing their emotions. They often go through things and may take it for granted that something is normal until they become young adults and they finally find the word or label for their circumstance.
However, resilience is a real thing. As mentioned earlier, trauma is not a deterministic life sentence. It can be a major influence in your life, but it is not the only part of you that has to be dominant.
In reality, the best thing we can do as adults is to provide a trauma-informed lens towards educating the younger generation. For example, with the way the world is right now, perhaps you can:
- Be more emotionally available and empathetic
- Actively ask those younger people how you can best help them
- Look out for potential triggers and identify any potential patterns
- Show them some self-care strategies
- Provide some degree of structure, reliability, and predictability
- Enforce empowering and self-affirming statements
- Reframe narratives as one of curiosity instead of judgement
With the way the world is right now, we can use as much humanity and compassion as we can get. Plus, as researchers Perry, Pollard, Blakley, Baker, and Vigilante once famously reported,
It is an ultimate irony that at the time when the human is most vulnerable to the effects of trauma — during infancy and childhood — adults generally presume the most resilience.
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