I am not a fan of finger pointing. I certainly don’t wish to point a finger at myself. But in the interest of keeping a national dialogue about preventing epidemic levels of childhood trauma on track, let’s be clear that all of us collectively allow unsafe childhoods, filled with adversity, to remain a standard feature of these United States.
In Anna, Age Eight we write,
“We do not control the actions of one broken person doing harm to one child, but we do influence the surrounding environment that is the single biggest predictor of whether the harm will come. Change will arrive only when we who are ultimately responsible for the situation demand it.”
Here is the question to spend some time one: What on earth would that change look like?
Most of the compassionate people I work with in the public sector in the US barely have a picture of that, despite living in a nation obsessed with numerical metrics that fancies itself as forward thinking.
We know childhood trauma is happening across all socio-economic classes. Those with resources like behavioral health care may suffer in silence. Or might seek help eventually. Now think about your city’s most vulnerable kids and families in less-resourced communities. You know what the neighborhoods may look like. Many have boarded up homes and storefronts. Many lack robust early childhood learning center with children laughing as they learn. As a matter of fact, if you walk the streets of our most low income neighborhoods and use our Resilient Community Experience Survey, you will learn from residents just how difficult it is to access behavioral health care, medical and dental care, safe shelter, stable food, easy to use transportation, youth mentors and job training.
Healthy, safe and resilient children have the best chance for a trauma-free life if they grow up within a resourced community. (Review your research on the social determinants of health for a sobering reality check.)
Now back to data and our call to action within Anna, Age Eight and the chapter Get the data and make a plan: Why we all live in Santa Fe. With kids, we tend to measure what’s going right, like satisfactory math scores, school attendance, graduation rates, and college admissions percentages. These numbers are great to have, but they don’t tell the full story. What’s missing is the information about the people who ended up on the other side of the hoped-for outcome. Were they safe from violence and assault? Did they live in homes that prominently featured substance abuse, untreated mental illness, or neglect and malnutrition? We need to measure success, to be sure, but to do so correctly we must also measure failure.
Our collective failure to act and end childhood trauma must and will end.
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