The Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate is teaming up with UMass Chan Medical school to launch a new center to help schools and other child-serving organizations address psychological trauma in kids.
Speaking Thursday with GBH News, Melissa Threadgill of the Child Advocate's office pointed to research showing a quarter of U.S. children witness or experience a traumatic event before age four.
"And we know that a lot of kids have unfortunately experienced a lot of trauma this year, which makes it more important than ever that we make sure our child-serving systems have the support they need to support children and families," Threadgill said.
That's the goal of the new Center on Child Wellbeing and Trauma, which will train schools, early education centers, group homes, and other organizations on how to help children who have experienced trauma.
The Office of the Child Advocate ordinarily studies these issues and makes recommendations to state agencies, Threadgill said.
"But up until this point, we haven't taken that next step and really provided the training and technical assistance and support to child-serving organizations to do this work," she said. "So it is a really major expansion of the services and support that the state is going to be providing."
Threadgill said that could include evaluating how schools and agencies interact with children and families who come to them for services.
She said, for example, that if a child is acting out, "how might we see that behavior as a result of trauma rather than just being a quote unquote 'bad kid?'" she said. "When our understanding of that child and what they might be going through changes, we can change the way we react to them, to help them recover, rather than inflicting actually more harm and more trauma on that child."
A state legislative task force examining childhood trauma chaired by the Office of the Child Advocate recommended the establishment of the center in 2020, and the state invested a million dollars in the fiscal year 2022 budget to launch it.
The center's executive director, Audrey Smolkin of UMass Chan Medical School, said there's a wide range of negative experiences that can result in childhood trauma.
"There are things like losing a parent to violence or drug overdose, having a parent that's incarcerated, having physical, sexual or emotional abuse in the home. All of those happen within the home context," Smolkin said. But looking more broadly, she said, there are also "community adverse childhood experiences. Racism could be a very traumatic thing that's happening to a child over and over and over again."
The center is offering an online training on its newly-created website to educate teachers and school administrators about racial trauma and equity.
"Massachusetts is actually a very good state for kids in terms of... the really big picture," Smolkin said. "But if you look at the statistics of who ends up involved in state systems, who has negative trajectories, who ends up with some of the negative outcomes throughout their lifetime, it's disproportionately kids of color. And we know that a lot of that is related to racial trauma and lack of racial equity across the state."
Smolkin said the goal of the center will be to not talk about trauma as if it's a life sentence for children.
"What can we as providers, helpers, community based organizations do to redirect that trajectory, so the child ends up with healthier wellbeing over their long term?"
