James Donaldson on Mental Health - How Trauma Affects Kids in School

Negative thinking Another challenge to traumatized kids is that they develop the belief that they’re bad, and what’s happened to them is their fault.

This leads to the expectation that people are not going to like them or treat them well.

Howard puts it, “I’m a bad kid.

Bad kids don’t do well in school.” Traumatized kids also tend to develop what Dr.

Howard calls a “hostile attribution bias” — the idea that everyone is out to get them.

“So if a teacher says, ‘Sit down in your seat,” they hear it as, ‘SIT DOWN IN YOUR SEAT!’” she explains.

“They hear it as exaggerated and angry and unfair.

So they’ll act out really quickly with irritability.” As Dr.

Rappaport puts it: “They see negative where we see neutral.” To counter this negative thinking, these students a narrative about themselves that helps them understand that they’re not “bad kids.” And learning to recognize their negative patterns of thought, like black and white thinking, is a step towards being able to change those patterns.

Rappaport notes that children from abusive homes are sometimes unable to participate in classroom activities because they are paralyzed by fear of making a mistake, and that can make them appear to be oppositional.