Small reading nooks provide a great example of human scale for children at the Smithfield Elementary School. Source: HKS INC.
By Erin Peavey, Psychology Today, September 23, 2023
Childhood can be hard even in the best of times. Children are inherently at a power disadvantage, still learning how to manage their emotions, and at the will of adults for food, shelter, and emotional regulation. Frustration, failure, and conflict are unavoidable, but not necessarily bad for children in the long run.
But children today face some uniquely difficult conditions, from school shootings (or the threat of them), to the looming threat of climate change, to the pandemic uprooting their sense of structure, control, and predictability. The accumulation of these overwhelming events, occurring on a regular basis—not to mention the additional very real challenges that many children face at home—could contribute to what some call “small T-trauma” (a term I admittedly don’t love). This can in some cases alter the structure of a child’s brain to be hyper-alert to attempt to control their environment or avoid future pain.
What Do We Mean by Trauma, and How Does it Impact the Brain?
Trauma is often misunderstood as impacting just a small subset of the population, but it actually may be much more common than people realize. Approximately 64 percent of adults in the United States report having experienced at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE) before age 18, and one in six individuals report having four or more ACEs.
Comments (0)