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Adverse Experiences are events that can cause trauma in childhood, including abuse, witnessing violence, and instability at home. The trauma that comes from experiencing adversity in childhood releases stress hormones that can lead to changes in the body and brain. Experiencing chronic stress during a critical time in development can negatively affect children's cognition, health, and well-being, as well as their academic achievement. The effects of Adverse Experiences are cumulative (at least to an extent), so the more Adverse Experiences a child is exposed to, the more it may affect their development. However, children's brains allow a high degree of neural reorganization or plasticity, potentially supporting recovery and resilience following Adverse Experiences.
Adverse experiences can include:
Many children in the U.S. are affected by Adverse Experiences: for example, in a retrospective survey across 23 states, over 60% of US adults reported experiencing one or more childhood Adverse Experience. Black, Latino, and Indigenous children are more likely to be exposed to early Adverse Experiences than their white or Asian peers. This is likely due to structural discrimination which has led to pervasive differences in Socioeconomic Status across racial groups, and thus a lack of access to resources. In addition, Black children and other students from historically and systematically excluded groups often experience racial trauma in the form of implicit or explicit biases or discrimination, such as school disciplinary policies.
Adverse Experiences can give rise to chronic stress and trauma, which can result in long-term changes to health, behavior, social skills, and brain structure and functioning, and have the potential to increase the risk for learning disabilities and ADHD. And children with developmental disabilities are also at increased risk of Adverse Experiences. These effects can have far-reaching consequences on children's sense of Safety, Physical Well-being, and Emotion, as well as on academic outcomes. Appropriate Social Supports can help reduce children's chronic stress, potentially buffering children from the negative effects of Adverse Experiences. Educators have an opportunity to offer the Social Supports so critical for children undergoing Adverse Experiences, and can reduce the likelihood of school-based trauma: for example, by avoiding disciplinary policies that disadvantage students of systematically and historically excluded backgrounds and that aren't supportive of the needs of those students who also have ADHD or learning disabilities. In addition, a supportive and attentive early classroom environment can help children with Adverse Experiences close academic opportunity gaps.
Finally, promising research has shown that children's malleable brains have increased opportunities to form new connections, and to recover and learn from experiences of trauma. There is significant variability in children's paths to recovery from trauma, so more research in this area can contribute important insights into interventions and recovery.
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