Growing up is never easy, but for some children, the trauma they experience during those years can have a lasting impact on their future.
That was the message given during a showing of the documentary “Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope” last week at Brown County High School.
It examines how “toxic stress” can cause hormones to take a toll on the brains and bodies of children. Research has shown that ultimately, this can put them at risk for disease, homelessness, incarceration and early death.
Everyone has stress in their lives, but what makes stress toxic is when it never leaves a child’s mind, the documentary said. The film compared it to feeling like you have to avoid a truck hitting you day after day. “The child may not remember, but the body remembers,” it said.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Almost 100 people attended the showing and a panel discussion after it.
The Indiana Department of Education picked Brown County as one location around the state where the film was shown.
Brown County Schools has been a community leader in recognizing how emotional health and wellbeing plays into children’s development, including their ability to learn.
Since 2017, local mental health care provider Centerstone has had therapists and family support specialists working in all buildings to help students and families who are struggling in some way. All employees are funded entirely through Centerstone and services are billed through insurance or other contracted providers.
The district also has been incorporating regular social-emotional lessons into schools using different curricula, reinforcing concepts such as kindness, responsibility and respect, and making it a point to reward students for good behavior.
Cathy Berger, assistant director of social, emotional and behavioral wellness for the IDOE, facilitated the discussion after the film.
Panel members were Brown County Schools Superintendent Laura Hammack, Van Buren Elementary School Principal Gavin Steele, foster parent Ryan Dodge, youth minister Cory Joy, 2019 Brown County High School graduate Madison Bickley, director of the school district’s Check and Connect program Terri Whitcomb, Centerstone therapist Megan Ames and Dr. Sandy Washburn from Indiana University.
“This is No. 6 of our screenings, and I honestly believe this is one of the biggest crowd we’ve had,” Berger said. “It speaks volumes to your community and your willingness to educate yourselves and be aware and see how you can support families in your community.”
What’s your score?
The documentary examined the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. The 10-question ACESs quiz is designed to be given to children before their 18th birthday.
Questions center on such topics as whether the child was abused physically, emotionally or sexually; if their parents divorced; if a household member had gone to prison; if the child felt like a parent was ever too drunk or high to take care of them; and if they felt like they were loved and taken care of.
Each ‘Yes’ answer is one point. The higher the ACE score, the more likely a child is to experience challenges such as chronic disease and risky behavior, like drug use, in the future, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
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For example, a person with an ACE score of six or higher is likely to have a life span that is 20 years shorter. As the ACE score goes up, so does the likelihood that child will smoke, have drug or alcohol addictions, or experience depression and teenage pregnancy, the documentary states.
An ACE score of four or more means that a child is 32 times more likely to have trouble in school, the documentary stated.
But a high ACE score does not always mean that a child will experience negative outcomes in life. Positive experiences, such as believing their mother and father loved them as a child, can build up their resiliency to adversity, according to the documentary and the CDC.
In addition to the ACEs quiz, a resiliency quiz also was distributed during the documentary screening. This helps people understand what factors in their life have helped to build up their resiliency, such as having people encouraging them to succeed, learning life skills like healthy conflict resolution, and being involved in extracurricular activities.
Other resiliency builders include having positive relationships, having a good sense of humor, being self-motivated and having a sense of spirituality.
The documentary showed what doctors, educators and social workers are doing to help to build resiliency and to prevent further adversity for children throughout the nation.
Being aware
Every Monday morning at Van Buren Elementary School, students receive specific lessons on empathy, problem solving, compassion and how to handle anger.
“Everyone is going to get mad, and that’s OK, but it’s how we handle it from there that we can learn,” Steele said.
The lessons are a part of Second Step, a social-emotional learning curriculum used from kindergarten to eighth grade in Brown County Schools that is funded by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
“What that allowed us to do was we realized we were meeting kids where they were at with math, we were meeting kids where they were at with reading, but we were just handling social-emotional issues as they came up with kids,” Steele said.
Hammack said that the district sees toxic stress translate into troublesome behaviors, which other students, parents, and grandparents raising their grandchildren are mentioning to school leaders.
“We see students who are angry. We see students who behave in ways that are aggressive. We see students who act out and bully. It manifests in very real, observable behaviors,” she said.
Those behaviors are very close to what are seen in students with attention-deficit disorder (ADD) or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), said Whitcomb. She has worked as a social worker in Brown County and in local schools.
Whitcomb said the research shown in the documentary was exciting. Over the years, she had been noticing an increase in ADD- and ADHD-type behavior, but for some of those students, medication did not work. She had been wanting to understand why.
“I see students every day who are just unable to regulate their brains enough to settle down and engage in school work, in the academics of school work,” she said.
Ames currently works as a mental health intervention specialist at Head Start preschool with 3- to 5-year-olds. She said sees “generational trauma” with the kids she serves — “toxic stress that has been passed down through families,” she said.
Her job is to work with families and in the school environment on how to best adapt to fit a child’s needs if they have avoidance issues, are aggressive, or have difficulty regulating their emotions. Ames said most of the kids she works with have all three challenges.
Washburn is a research associate with IU who has been working with schools for 25 years on schoolwide discipline and behavior management. She has been working on Brown County Schools’ social/emotional learning curriculum. She’s also weighing in on how the district handles mental health and victims of trauma. Her work is funded by a grant.
She said it’s important to build relationships with children who have had adversity, but that, too, can be difficult to do because they struggle to attach.
Joy said that as a minister, and as a husband to an educator, he has observed children struggle to communicate what’s wrong while those trying to help them work to get to the root of their problem. That process has to involve their families, too, he said — “seeing what’s happening with their children, then not placing judgment on them, but saying we really want to help you become the best you can, the all that you can, achieve everything that you’re called to achieve.”
At the state level, Berger said the IDOE does not formally collect ACE data like other states, but the department has collected data from the national level that shows about 47 percent of students in Indiana have an ACE score of 2 or higher. She expects the actual percentage is higher than that.
The IDOE works closely with the Department of Child Services, the state health department, the Department of Corrections and the Division of Mental Health and Addiction on this “statewide concern.”
“How can we really support our statewide efforts? It’s really within our communities,” Berger said.
Dodge is a foster parent to a 7-year-old child who has an ACE score of eight.
“I live with it every day. I think the biggest challenge is trying to help him overcome all of the challenges that he has experienced in his life. There’s a huge learning curve to this, and we’re just getting started,” he said.
‘A little less shame’
Resident Melissa Tatman stood up during the panel discussion to speak about her own ACE score and the scores of her family, which are all high.
“I feel, actually, a little less shame today, because it didn’t start with me,” she said.
Ames said that trauma and ACEs must be normalized.
“I love working with parents and families to help them realize that there are patterns that are not their fault, then giving them the tools to help reshape those for their families,” she said.
Whitcomb said even her own children would not get a zero on the ACE questionnaire. “I think that’s what makes this awesome is that we’re learning. We all have that power to break that cycle that we’ve been in, that we didn’t put ourselves in necessarily, but that we’ve been in,” she said.
Some may assume that children can “just suck it up” when experiencing stress or trauma. But the documentary and panelists both say that’s not the right response, and it will only intensify toxic stress for future generations.
“If our parents have not addressed their own social-emotional concerns, we start to see that shifted to students. If the students don’t have the abilities or the opportunities, I think we’ll see that transition to their children and (it will) intensify,” Steele said.
The idea of just “sucking it up” is something Ames combats daily.
“Sometimes, it’s hard to admit that your child has traumatic experiences. Sometimes, as a teacher in a school setting, it’s hard to admit that the child just can’t do what you want them to do, versus they won’t do what you want them to do,” she said.
With the kids she works with at Head Start, Ames said she is already seeing “extremely aggressive” behavior. That requires intervention now before consequences become worse as they get older.
“Giving them that foundation while they’re young, before that pattern has really set in for them is crucial, but also working with the parents on how do you interact with your child to, one, help them manage these symptoms and then, two, how do you start to shape the world around them to combat the things they are already dealing with?” she said.
Hammack said the idea of “just sucking it up” has a parallel with addiction.
“When you tell a student to just ‘Suck it up,’ it’s kind of like saying to an addict, ‘Just stop,’” she said.
“Students who have behaviors that are explosive or angry or disruptive to a classroom, if you ask them if that’s something they want to do, usually the answer is no.”
Berger said she visits school districts throughout the state as part of her job. One assistant superintendent shared with her how a grandparent told her that students need to be spanked and have “hardcore discipline” at school when acting out.
“She looked at him and said, ‘If you were to go to the doctor today and he told you that you had cancer, would you rather him treat you with the current research or the research from 20 years ago?’ That really made him stop and think in the moment,” she said.
“We didn’t know this research previously, so now that we do have this, now that we can look at behaviors that our students are doing or presenting at that time, we can really switch how we address them.”
‘Creating a movement’
Hammack said district leaders have been thinking about how to bridge the gap that can sometimes exist between school and home, in terms of communication and in terms of environment.
“You can host events, you can host educational opportunities, you can put together a really slick PowerPoint presentation, and folks don’t come,” Hammack said. “I can walk away and be frustrated by that, or I can just say, ‘OK that didn’t work. We have to figure something else out.’”
She wants to see the district partner with families “in ways that we’re not being preachy or judgy. I know, many times, me standing here in pearls is really not cool when it comes to making connections. I need to be more aware of myself and how I present,” she said.
Berger said it’s important for schools to build relationships with families beyond just the school day.
Washburn said that being open and understanding the struggles of families will help. “A lot of people who didn’t have a positive experience in school have a hard time trusting us,” she said.
Washburn said assuming kids can just “suck it up” could result in more kids leaving school, or even becoming parents themselves.
“I feel like the kids that we’re working with today that have adversity, that don’t have a lot of resiliency builders in their life, are only a few years away sometimes from being the parents of the next generation,” she said.
“We don’t do much with high school kids around parenting, we don’t do much with high school kids around early childhood development, we don’t do much with any kids about understanding brain development and neuroscience. If we don’t do that, we’ll continue on the trajectory that we’re on.”
Whitcomb emphasized that a high ACE score does not have to shape a person’s life.
“I think if all of us in this room were to do the questionnaire right now, we would maybe be surprised at how high our scores are, but there are lots of things that shaped our lives. Some were positive and some were not, but the most hopeful thing I think they said in that movie was that even one caring adult in a child’s life can make such a huge difference. You don’t need a Ph.D to be able to love someone, and we all have the capacity to do that.”
“We’re creating a movement,” she continued.
“To come together as a community and start to talk about, ‘What are the next steps?’ — it’s not going to look the same in every single community, but what does that look like in Brown County? What do we need here? That’s how it begins.”
Dodge said he has hope from seeing a difference in his foster child after only nine months in his home.
“Through structure, consistency and a healthy diet, and exercise and activity, and all of that, you can see a tremendous amount of improvement in just a short period of time,” he said.
“As we move forward not only as a community, but really as a nation, I think we’ll continue to see a tremendous amount of progress for generations to come.”
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Click on this story online at bcdemocrat.com to complete the ACE questionnaire and the resiliency quiz.
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