How kids heal from trauma

All children in foster care carry emotional wounds that we call trauma.

Trauma is when an experience overwhelms someone’s ability to cope. While there are some tools that attempt to list the most common sources of trauma among children, everyone has different coping skills so the threshold for what constitutes trauma is also different for each person. But relative to adults, children have less developed coping skills, so they are more vulnerable to this kind of emotional damage.

Much like the cause, the effects of trauma manifest differently person-to-person. But all trauma response is a subconscious attempt to protect oneself from repeating that harmful experience either through preemptively fighting to prevent it or running away to avoid it—sometimes called fight or flight response. But children who have experienced trauma exhibit their fight or flight response even when there is no danger nearby simply because they are reminded of that painful event.

For example, a child may respond to a traumatic experience by throwing a tantrum whenever they encounter something that reminds them of that situation. Or a different child may respond to the exact same situation by refusing to participate in school because their teacher looks like the person who harmed them. These are just examples, though; trauma symptoms take many forms.

Trauma response behaviors, just like symptoms of any other illness, interrupts mainstays of childhood like school and playtime and it makes life hard for kids and their caregivers alike. But, trauma is treatable.

We cannot go back in time and erase the painful parts of a child’s past, but we don’t have to. A child’s brain is remaking itself all the time—forming new pathways and connections, developing new ways of seeing the world and building new skills. In the right conditions—namely, consistent safety and freedom from threat of violence or harm—even a child deeply impacted by severe trauma will heal. That is the work of foster care.

“We cannot go back in time and erase the painful parts of a child’s past, but we don’t have to. A child’s brain is remaking itself all the time”

Foster parents create and maintain the conditions in which children can recover from horrific trauma. They endure erratic behavior with unshakeable calm, defying every expectation that mistreated children have about adults. They clean up the debris of abuse, they unwind the tension from being under constant threat, and they repair the wear from chronic neglect all by just being their affable selves. And when children show the first signs of healing, foster parents gasp, applaud and say, “look what you can do!”