As a classroom teacher with over 20 years in K-12 schools, I have always worked very hard to meet the needs of all of my students, even those with enormous emotional and behavioral challenges.
I have created a welcoming, safe environment.
I have treated each student with kindness and respect.
While I’ve never been perfect, I have done my best to nurture them every day to reach their potential.
As the saying goes, “Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
And more than anything else about the job, I really do care about my students.
In those early years of my teaching career before I became a parent, I spent many hours each day supporting struggling students and then staying at school way past dinner time grading papers and preparing lessons.
Only a few parents came to parent-teacher conference night, and those same parents showed up for all the other events and activities we dedicated teachers planned.
Because of these and other experiences, there were many days I felt like I cared more about my students even more than their parents did.
Otherwise, why would so many of my students come to school looking so sad, lost, and discouraged?
I’m not alone in feeling this way. A common theme that I have heard over and over from frustrated educators is that they are doing everything they can to teach students, the behaviors at school are out of control, and that everything would be just fine if only it weren’t for so many parents not doing their jobs.
The myth has been around so long and repeated so often that we assume it must be true.
And that brings me to another one of my favorite sayings:
“It’s too late to agree with me; I’ve changed my mind.”
,
Now that I am a parent of a child with many challenges and special needs, I regret that I ever made the assumption that parents just don’t care about their kids.
I would like to challenge my fellow educators to examine their biases and assumptions as well.
Based on personal experience, observing and talking with hundreds of parents, students, and teachers over the years, and a lot of soul-searching, I now believe that vast majority of parents and teachers are all doing the very best they can to raise and educate children with differences, disabilities, and diagnoses, often under very difficult circumstances – both at home and at school.
Teachers often don’t know what they don’t know. Maybe the parent isn’t coming to the school event because they just spent three hours driving back and forth from an appointment with a medical specialist or counselor.
In a pervious article, I talked about the problem of parent shaming, which unfortunately is going on both out in the community and in the schools. I believe this problem stems from a basic misunderstanding and perpetuation of personal biases and long-held assumptions.
Parents don’t always know how to care for their kids, but most of them really do care and want the best for them. I would say this applies to teachers, too.
We are all simply exhausted from the effort it takes, and we are trying really hard to help these children. In many cases, we are still using old, ineffective parenting and teaching strategies.
Certainly we can all agree that there are some parents out there who are not as involved or nurturing, and there are parents who neglect and abuse their children, too. These are the exception, not the norm.
There are also teachers who are not involved or nurturing, and a quick Google search on school news will sadly show that there are also some teachers who neglect and abuse their students. Again, they are also the exception, not the norm.
We need to educate and help both parents and teachers so they can learn new, more effective ways of supporting children towards emotional regulation leading to growth, healing and success. That’s our mission at HEART-STRONG International, and I truly hope that neurologically-informed, healing-centered interventions become standard practice in schools.
I believe we do a huge disservice to our children and their families when we persist in this “us vs. them” paradigm.
When we point our fingers at others, it’s important to remember there are always three fingers pointing right back us.
So to solve the problem, we need to start with ourselves.
It is especially essential for schools to take ownership of their part of the problem when they decide to call themselves “trauma-informed” schools.
The Movement
The trauma-informed educational movement is a growing trend in schools today, and for good reason.
Researchers estimate that from 20 – 50% or more of all children in classrooms today have been affected by Adverse Childhood Experiences, or “ACEs” such as abuse, neglect, and other psychologically traumatic experiences.
These ACEs can affect everything in a child’s development, including their ability to learn, their relationships and behaviors with adults and peers, and even their vulnerability to illness and disease throughout their lifetimes.
As California Surgeon General Nadine Burke-Harris said so eloquently when quoting Dr. Robert Block, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in her TED Talk in 2014, “Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today.”
The Paradigm Shift
While the buzz and energy around the topic is growing, the idea of treating kids with compassion and understanding rather than resorting to a punitive system of rewards and consequences is not new.
Researchers, child advocates, and parents have long been asking the schools to look more critically at unfair, outdated placement and disciplinary practices that are disproportionately applied in a negative way to students of color and those with difference and disabilities.
An increasing number of teachers, administrators, and other professionals in the field of education are realizing that a trauma-informed paradigm shift for an even greater percentage of the population is long overdue in light of what we know about how the brain and body respond to ACEs and toxic stress.
As a result, there are Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) curricula now available for general education classes instead of just special ed classes, schools are setting up “calm-down corners” in classrooms and taking a critical look at “no tolerance” punitive codes of conduct including seclusion and restraint practices. There are now several national educator conferences focused around the topic of how to implement trauma-informed practices in our schools.
The Potential for Positive Change
I believe that this shift in attitude and openness to change on the part of a growing number of educators is a wonderful and welcome development, and I am doing my part to be an active participant in this movement. As usual, there will be plenty of growing pains as schools go through their collective and individual learning curves about real-world implementation and policy changes.
Those of us who have been doing this work with children from an inclusion and accessibility lens for many years are already well-acquainted with the challenges of maintaining compassion and connection with anxious and traumatized students, but the most dedicated among us always find a way to overcome those challenges to support the children we serve.
Being a parent of a child with special emotional and behavioral needs has also given me a new lens from which to examine how to approach the issues.
The Problem
Before we can heal and grow our students, we first need to heal and grow ourselves, our understanding, and the institutions that we serve.
We also need to acknowledge that schools have been the source of trauma for many of the very same students we are now trying to reach in our so-called “trauma-informed” programs and practices.
Blamed and Shamed
To be clear, as a teacher for over two decades, I am well aware of the tremendous challenges that teachers face in schools.
Unfunded mandates and overcrowded classrooms with very little support and no time for basic self-care needs is a huge issue for stressed-out and under-paid teachers everywhere.
However, as the parent of a child with differences, disabilities, and diagnoses that have a serious impact his school experiences, I have also been on the “other side of the table” at many meetings with school officials and teachers new to the trauma-informed movement.
In most of those meetings, despite their claim to know all about the social and emotional needs of children, several teachers have blamed my son for not being able to access what they were teaching him rather than making the necessary accommodations and having the compassion to see the pain beneath his academic, social and emotional challenges.
We moved to a new district hoping to have a better experience, but unfortunately, the shame and blame game was still strong there. We found ourselves once again amongst educators who persist in the outdated and uninformed perspective of having so-called “high expectations” for children as a euphemism for an unwillingness to meet the child’s specific needs.
Instead of focusing on and building upon children’s unique strengths, many teachers still insist on removing students to isolated special education classes where they are given a boring, repetitive curriculum focused on remediating weaknesses.
Most schools also persist in using traditional discipline systems that trigger the stress response of fight-flight-freeze in students with compromised nervous systems due to trauma.
At my son’s new school, I shared some ideas and strategies that I felt might be a more trauma-informed and effective approach, based on hours of personal reading and research about trauma, practical applications at home and in his intermediate school, as well as my experience as a K-12 classroom teacher of students with special language and learning needs.
I was careful to share this with a collaborative spirit, as I know teachers often feel bullied by “know-it-all” parents.
However, instead of welcoming my input and making me feel part of the team working for my son’s success, the head administrator of Special Education department simply shrugged and then had the audacity to say, “Oh, we are already a trauma-informed district. We had an all-day training on it last year.”
Ironically, this particular district has won several awards for mental health awareness and education in the state and is one of the top ten schools in the country addressing mental health issues in the schools today.
While I commend their enthusiasm for the topic, it’s clear that they simply don’t know what they don’t know.
This “I have a degree and went to a workshop, therefore I know more than you” attitude is not serving students and families at all.
In my work as a parent educator, I have found that my story exemplifies the experience of so many other parents whose kids don’t neatly fit into standardized school boxes, no matter how hard the administrators and teachers try to make them fit.
I implore all educators to sit down to have a real heart-to-heart conversation with families of struggling children with an open mind and willingness to learning something new, even if you are already well-educated on the topic of trauma.
It’s essential that all of us put aside our egos for the child’s best interest.
Toxic Stress and Institutionalized Trauma
What that administrator at the so-called “trauma-informed school” did not stop to consider before assuming he knew how to address my son’s needs effectively is that my son’s toxic stress and trauma is not only from his life growing up in an overseas orphanage before the adoption, but also from his traumatic experiences in U.S. schools after the adoption.
Every school that he has attended from elementary school up to high school has affected him negatively with toxic stress, systemic racism, discriminatory practices, standardized one-size-fits-all practices, and serious negativity and bullying — both from his peers and the professionals who were supposed to be helping him.
My son has endured incidents of racial bullying, sexual harassment, and aggressive behaviors (one student stabbed his hand with a pencil), and he grew afraid to report the incidents because administrators ignored or didn’t take his concerns seriously.
He has been placed in classes that were so easy that he was bored out of his skull, simply because his test scores are not nearly as high as his cognitive capacity.
Research demonstrates that being bored at school can be another source of toxic stress for kids who are creative, outside-the-box thinkers.
My son has many special needs, but he is bright and capable. Some teachers don’t know what to do with “twice exceptional” (2e) kids, and it’s easier just to try fitting the child into existing program than to design a program or spend time on appropriate trauma-informed accommodations that will meed the needs of each child.
These educators could not or perhaps because of bias were not willing to take a good hard look at what was happening at school to exacerbate his anxiety and persisted in finding fault with his “bad choices” or indirectly, my supposed “bad parenting.”
My son is not the only one who has been traumatized by a system that declared itself to be “trauma-informed.”
There are many other children who face disproportionate disciplinary practices, restraint and seclusion, stressed and burned-out teachers who barely pay attention to their students, and in some cases, corporal punishment and abuse.
If shame and blame is our paradigm, there is plenty to go around. It’s not doing anything to make things better for kids, though. We all need to do better.
Moving From Conflict to Collaboration
While we encountered many obstacles along the way, I do want to acknowledge that there were a few rare and wonderful teachers and other staff who did work hard to understand my son’s needs and support him. For those kind and understanding teachers, I am grateful.
We can go back and forth for days arguing about whether teachers or parents are mostly to blame for the challenges children are dealing with today, or we can just give up and say the problem lies in a generation of unmotivated, lazy, and entitled students. But that’s not a productive use of our time.
Too much is at stake, and we all need to take part in finding solutions.
There is also societal and political change that affects everyone from the top down, so figuring out “who started it” is a playground bully game I don’t really have any interest in continuing to be involved in. It’s time to move pas that and get on with the business of changing hearts and minds.
Today, I work as a parent educator and parent coach trainer while also teaching in a university MA program on trauma-informed education and engaging with other educators in the trauma-informed movement. What I’m seeing right now, as in many other areas of our society, is increasing polarization and blame that is destroying trust and the potential for a positive paradigm shift.
I urge educators to take a step back from being “crusaders for a movement” and first take a look at their biases and assumptions about parents. Once they have explored their own assumptions, I want them to allow parents to come alongside them to find solutions together that work for our children.
Parents also need to bring a spirit of collaboration with them and understand the enormous demands placed on teachers today.
It’s also important to consider that there are so many outside cultural and socio-economic factors that are affecting children, parents, and teachers. Whenever we are talking about trauma-informed practices, it is essential to include a discussion of equity and systemic barriers and how they affect our practices and decision-making.
White educators especially need to examine their racial biases when talking about trauma in terms of the potential for coming across to parents and the community as “white saviors” who know better how to raise children of color than their own parents and communities.
Just saying, “If the parents would do X, Y, and Z…” or “If the teachers would only listen…” is not enough. Let’s move beyond that and each of us do our part to make a change in the system.
Let’s find ways to communicate with each other as a team and support each other to bridge the gap between what our children are able to handle right now and what they can potentially achieve with a team of dedicated adults working together and cheering them on.
Throwing our hands up in despair and refusing to communicate with each other is just not an option any more. Our kids need all of the adults in their lives to step up our game, act like adults, and work collaboratively for system change.
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Want information on how to become a Trauma-Informed Specialist, Educational Trainer, or Parent Coach? Check out our Trauma-Informed Specialist Certification Program.