When a child experiences trauma it can affect how they think, feel and react to family, friends, other people and everyday situations. As a parent or caregiver, understanding trauma is important to effectively support your child. Our Specialist Family and Relationship Care practitioners offer information and strategies to help your child and your family.
What is trauma?
Trauma is an emotional or physical response to a stressful, frightening or distressing experience. Trauma can result from a single overwhelming incident like an accident, natural disaster, medical intervention or assault. It can also come from prolonged exposure to stressful situations such as domestic violence, living in an unstable environment, discrimination, bullying or neglect. Children may also be affected by in-utero impacts.
Childhood trauma can have lasting effects on emotional, cognitive, and social development, but with professional support, healing is possible.
We all experience trauma differently
It’s important to understand that children will experience trauma in different ways, making it especially challenging for parents to recognise in their child. The different ways that trauma can affect children include:
Emotionally – They may feel anxious, sad, lonely, fearful, numb, empty, isolated or withdrawn. They may find it difficult to regulate their emotions or be easily startled.
Physically – A child might experience pain, sweating, nausea, stomach aches, persistent bed wetting or they may have difficulty getting to sleep or staying asleep.
Behaviourally – Children may find it hard to concentrate, withdraw from activities, display feelings of hypervigilance or engage in risk taking behaviours. They may also display behaviours that align with the fight, flight, freeze, dissociate or shutdown responses.
Trauma and other mental health conditions
Trauma can lead to the development of other mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. If a child or individual experiences multiple stressors over time, this can also lead to complex trauma, increasing the risk of other health impacts such as psychological illness, eating disorders and chronic health conditions.