By Alex Smith
KCUR
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Every parent knows that young children have meltdowns now and then — at home, at school, in the grocery store. But sometimes a tantrum can be more than a bad day; it can be a sign of traumatic stress.
A program started in Kansas City, Kan., offers teachers and parents an alternate way to deal with kids’ intense emotions and potentially avoid the long-term impact of trauma. The program has been spreading in recent months, even getting national attention.
Acknowledge kids’ feelings
In the basement of Wyandotte United Methodist Church, teacher Twakisha Jones leads her small preschool class through a song.
They are a cheery bunch, but Jones recognizes that some of her young students deal with a lot in their lives.
“We don’t know what things happen at home,” Jones says. “But when they come in, they come in with all kinds of problems … if you watch different things that happen in neighborhoods, especially being low-income families.”
To some degree, trauma affects one in four children in the United States, according to the local creators of a program designed to address the problem. Children can experience trauma in the form of abuse or violence, but they also can experience it in less direct ways, such as through being neglected or witnessing violence.
Head Start Trauma Smart was developed by Crittenton Children’s Center, part of the St. Luke’s Health System of Kansas City. It got off the ground in Wyandotte County preschools in 2008.
Avis Smith, who directs the program, says the standard method of shutting down tantrums through punishments or timeouts is a mistake, especially for traumatized kids.
“Children need to feel connected to the adults around them and to their peers,” Smith says. “And so if we can do something to acknowledge feelings, that then allows that child to know, ‘Oh, she gets it. She really understands. I’m really upset. [It] doesn’t mean I can hit my friends, but she understands this was really upsetting to me.’”
The program was designed for Head Start, the national early education initiative focused on children from lower-income backgrounds.
Head Start Trauma Smart gives 20 hours of training to preschool teachers, who use the techniques with all of their students.
Teachers work to relate to upset kids, then aim to calm them at a station that includes soft objects to handle and sunglasses, which help reduce stress by lowering light levels.
They also use a “breathing star,” which is a file folder with a paper bird character inside that seems to breathe in and out as the folder opens and closes.
“OK, we’re going to take a big, deep breath now,” says therapist Brittany Cohoon, demonstrating the technique. “And so they’ll open the breathing star. And we say, ‘breathe in,’ and we’ll breathe in, and we’ll hold it. And we’ll breathe out.”
Cohoon also comes to the school for weekly one-on-one work with kids who need additional help.
The program offers training to other school staff, like cafeteria workers and bus drivers, to keep the message consistent. Parents also get trained in the techniques. Ultimately, the goal is for children to learn how to calm themselves.
Jones says she sees that happening in her Kansas City, Kan., classroom.
“If someone’s upset, we’ll even have another child tell that one, ‘Oh, you need to calm down. Take a deep breath or something,’” she says.
Gaining traction
Head Start Trauma Smart is about more than soothing hurt feelings. It is designed to help children cope with issues that can have serious consequences.
“Their brains are constantly thinking about, ‘Where is this potential threat? What can go wrong in this situation? Who might be wanting to hurt me?’” explains Dr. Jerry Dunn, executive director of Children’s Advocacy Services of Greater St. Louis. “And so they’re not able to really marshal their resources cognitively to think about, ‘How am I going to sound out this word? How am I going to figure out this subtraction problem?’”
Because trauma can affect a child’s brain development and ability to learn, Dunn says childhood traumatic stress eventually can lead to dangerous and unhealthy behavior in adolescence and beyond.
Similar programs, like the Circle Preschool Program in Richmond, Va., have cropped up recently in other parts of the country.
The local program started to take off in the fall of last year. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation granted $2.3 million to help Head Start Trauma Smart expand to 26 counties in Kansas and Missouri, serving about 3,300 preschoolers.
Program director Avis Smith says interest in Head Start Trauma Smart has snowballed in the past few weeks since a write-up about the program in The New York Times blog the Opinionator.
“We’ve had phone calls and emails from people as far away as Cape Town, South Africa, to Grenada to British Columbia,” Smith says.
The new attention has brought critics, including some who wonder how stretched-thin education funding can bear the annual $400 per student cost of Head Smart Trauma Smart.
But Smith believes the program can prevent the need for more expensive special education in later years and even bigger problems beyond that.
“We can stop the adverse effects of trauma from starting a child on that school-to-prison pipeline that has been so talked about,” Smith says. “Early childhood education is our very best investment.”
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