What's a trauma-informed school? It’s a place where this happens:
There’s this third-grade kid. Let’s call him Sam. He’s got ODD (oppositional defiant disorder…a misnomer for normal behavior a child exhibits when he’s living with chronic trauma).
Nine-year-old Sam (not his real name) is very smart. But sometimes he balked, dug his heels in deep, refused to work in class. So his teacher sent him to see the principal. Often.
The teacher and the principal knew something about his home life. At night, Sam sleeps on a couch. Dad sleeps on the other couch. The TV’s on all day, all night. When Dad’s awake, he always has a computer in his lap. Mom drifts in and out of the home. His parents have little to do with their son. They rarely touch him.
“He obviously needed hugs, and I was giving him those,” says the principal. But it wasn’t quite getting Sam out of his funk or making enough of a dent in his class behavior. “One day, I was teasing him and as he moved away, I poked him a little,” she recalls. “He laughed, and his eyes lit up. I did it again, and he laughed, and loved it.” In fact, he howled with laughter, inviting more tickles.
Not only was Sam not getting hugs at home, the principal realized, but his parents weren’t playing with him, either.
So, now Sam knows what he needs and where to get it. Three to five days a week, he walks into the principal’s office to be tickled and hugged.
“If people looked in and didn't know what was going on, they would say I'm torturing this kid,” says the principal, because Sam rolls on the floor and shrieks with laughter. “It's not usually what I do with kids. But he needs touch. So, I tickle him for a while. Then he falls into my lap, gets some hugs. Then he straightens up and says: ‘I'm ready to go to class.’ ”
Sam’s calmer and happier. And, because he has a caring adult who’s giving him the basic human interaction that’s necessary for him to grow into a healthy adult, his brain, which gets big doses of blinding toxic stress at home, returns to a more open, peaceful state so that he can focus in class.
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By now, some of you are muttering: “Schools shouldn’t have to deal with kids’ problems – their parents need to take responsibility.” “The parents are to blame.” “The parents need to pull it together.”
There are two schools of thought here (pardon the pun).
School of Thought No. 1. You can point the finger at parents and
wait for them to change. Counseling would help, but they’d have to agree to participate. Free or low-cost counseling for people who can’t afford it isn’t a given in these days of social service budgets stripped to the bone. And, counseling would take months, if not years to change the......[Continue reading...]
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