Question
What does a safe environment look like for young children?
Answer
All children, regardless of background, need to feel safe. Safety is the launching pad for everything, including resiliency, growth, healing, and recovery. Safety is not just physical. It also includes how we respond to various needs, such as emotional, psychological, social, spiritual, and behavioral. So much is often out of our control. Creating a safe environment is something that is within our control. We can start doing that now as providers, no matter your role with children. Here are some things to remember and do as you create a safe environment.
Remember that not all strategies work for all children. What might help with one child might not help with another child. Find strengths even in children with the most challenging behaviors. Remind them often of what they are doing well. Children that are always called bad might feel bad about themselves. But if you highlight even that little strength, they will feel good about themselves and know that someone cares about them, especially if it's a child that has experienced trauma.
Create and maintain consistent daily routines for the classroom. While this refers explicitly to classrooms, it's important for anyone working with young children to implement or help parents implement daily routines and consistency in any setting. Stability helps children understand that the world can be a safe place. They feel empowered when they know the order of the events and how they will be carried out. For example, place a visual calendar on a wall or create a book with images or photographs outlining the daily schedule.
A related suggestion is to tell children when something unexpected is going to occur. This is important because, for children with some trauma, the unexpected can be highly triggering to them. The most minor unexpected event, such as a loud noise or a visit from an outsider, can be a reminder of trauma and trigger children's stress responses. Therefore, it is essential to try to mitigate the fear and uncertainty that often come with unexpected changes by letting children know about changes to the schedule or routine.
Offer children developmentally appropriate choices. Traumatic events often involve loss of control. Remember, people feel fear and helplessness. Empowering children to have ownership of their behaviors and interests by giving them choices about things like where they want to sit at lunch or which songs to sing at circle time can help build healthy self-esteem. That empowers them as well. They might not have had that power before because they felt helpless.
Anticipate difficult periods and transitions during the school day and offer extra support during these times. Many situations can remind children of their traumas, but your support can help alleviate their responses. Use techniques to support children's self-regulation. Introducing deep breathing and other centering activities, such as mindfulness, helps children self-regulate. Starting each day with a special breathing ritual gives them the strategy they need to pay attention to and modify their breaths when they are stressed. Deep breathing and any form of mindfulness are beneficial because it centers the body. Starting that off in the morning is not only helpful for children that have experienced some level of trauma but for all children.
Be nurturing and affectionate but also sensitive to children's triggers. Being physically close to young children can reassure them, but with children with a history of sexual abuse, a good rule of thumb is to be physically affectionate only when they seek it. Being too close to them can be a trigger. Wait until they want to feel that affection to offer it. Use positive guidance to help all children. Strive to create supportive interventions to guide children to appropriate activities.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Collective Trauma and Building a Trauma-Informed Culture, presented by Nadia Tourinho, MSW, LICSW, LCSW-C.
