great website!!!! and trauma publication for schools

[momof5]

Just wanted to pass along this website, (don't know how to highlight it so you can just click on it). It is www.massadvocates.org. There is a publication you can purchase or download entitled MAC's Helping Traumatized Children Learn. There is a group in MA, the trauma and learning policy initiative that created this bbok/document to help schools be more sensitve to how trauma in children affects learning. It is an incredibly inclusive document and one I think folks here might want to show to their schools. Even for homeschoolers it helps highlight why our kids can't learn when they are hyperaroused. I so wish my son's school had this early on to help me in my pursuits to help his school be more sensitive to where some of his behavior was coming from and why he could not always put words to his emotions and what he was feeling or why he did something.

[artsymominnc]

looks like a great resource....thanks for sharing that information!
Liz

[artsymominnc]

It's a lengthy file to download, but here's a sampling of the information: (pages 29-30)

Fear as a Way of Life: The Developing Brain

The great risk for children who live in violent homes and who routinely operate in survival mode is that this way of functioning can permeate every aspect of their lives and can even take on a life of its own. According to brain researchers, when children encounter a perceived threat to their safety, their brains trigger a complex set of chemical and neurological events known as the “stress response.”47 The stress response activates a natural instinct to prepare to fight, freeze, or flee from the unsafe event. Under normal circumstances these responses to stress are constructive and help keep a child safe.

However, when a child operates in overwhelming states of stress or fear, survival responses that may be fully appropriate in danger-laden situations (e.g., shutting down, constantly surveying the room for danger, expecting to fight or run away at a moment’s notice) can become a regular mode of functioning. Even when the dangers are not present, children may react to the world as if they are.48 Unable to regulate heightened levels of arousal and emotional responses, they simply cannot turn off the survival strategies that their brains have been conditioned to employ.49

Neurobiologist Bruce Perry and his colleagues at the Child Trauma Academy explain that the most developed areas of a child’s brain are the ones used most frequently. When children live in a persistent state of fear, the areas of their brains controlling the fear response can become overdeveloped.50 These parts of the brain may direct behavior even in situations in which it would be more appropriate for other parts of the brain to be in charge. It is important to note that the areas of the brain active in fearful states are different from those active in calm states, and it is predominately the areas active in calm states that are required for academic learning.51

Brain researchers use the term “plasticity” to explain the environment’s enormous influence on the growing child’s developing brain.52 This means that children’s brains are more malleable than those of adults. However, just as traumatic experiences can undermine the brain’s development, good experiences can enhance it.53 In addition, skill development is a scaffolding process, with each skill building upon the one before. Both the plasticity of brain development and the scaffolding nature of skill development are strong reasons to intervene as early as possible with supportive, ameliorative, and protective experiences. Early intervention gives a child the best chance to follow a developmental trajectory unencumbered by the effects of trauma.54