All attendees of the California ACEs Summit this week were assigned a child to “follow” during the conference. We received updates about our child throughout the conference and, on the last day, met with other attendees to talk about what we could do to provide trauma-informed care for the child. I was assigned “Nina.” Before you continuing reading, click Nina’s name and read about her and her experiences.
In our breakout group discussion about Nina, we first talked about how overwhelming her experiences are. The reality is that Nina’s situation (and the situations of children like Nina) is bad. There is a real possibility that she will be sent back to El Salvador. And we can’t change or undo the sexual assault she experienced. However, there are ways that her pediatrician and principal can implement trauma-informed practices that can improve her resilience and her life.
Our group highlighted that Nina’s pediatrician should ask more questions, finding out more about her home life and how she feels about what is happening both to her and around her. They can provide her and her mother with nutritional information for the weight-gain, but they can also refer her to a social worker who can provide her with additional resources.
We were very lucky that our group included Godwin Higa, principal of Cherokee Point Elementary School, and so we had “expert” opinion on how Nina’s principal could respond in a trauma-informed manner. He suggested that we should bring Nina’s mother into the school and have a conversation with both Nina and her mother about what is happening in their home. He also recommended an in-school suspension opposed to an out-of-school suspension, and suggested an intervention team that included everyone involved in the fight, parents, and others that could help debrief about the event. We decided it was important to not only build a team around the family, but also a team of the family.
We also discussed the need to create a safe school climate that would help to reduce bullying, and the need for a comprehensive school health center and more school counselors.
Thinking in the long-term, we hoped that all students could be educated about ACEs. This would serve two purposes, 1) it would make children aware of how their own experiences may have affected them, and 2) it would help children to know how to treat others who may be expressing “problem behaviors.” This would help them see their fellow students not as “bad kids,” but rather as coming from bad situations. Ideally, this perspective would also carry over into how they see people when they become adults.
Finally, we discussed who might be the biggest opponents to these trauma-informed changes. We realized that often these are other parents in the school. Godwin Higa suggested that when this happens it is often best to turn the situation back around to them—“What would you want done if it were your child?” After making this suggestion, he reminded us, “You will always win a fight when it’s best for kids.”
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