Classrooms as Spaces for Healing
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network’s Attachment Vitamins course provides comprehensive strategies to encourage secure attachment and healthy socialization in children. Experts explore factors that influence social-emotional development and identify behaviors that are often related to childhood trauma. Themes emerge from the training that reveal insights about how to optimize practices within caregiving settings, such as classrooms, to help children feel safe and supported.
Attachment Vitamins emphasizes that individuals who administer care to children should reflect on their own need for healing. Unresolved trauma influences behavior not just in childhood but throughout the lifespan; therefore, providers must address their own mental health needs to effectively facilitate wellbeing in others.
This direction applies to classroom contexts, where responses to stressful circumstances and/or challenging behaviors often depend on educators’ mental health standing. For example, a teacher who is burdened by their own unresolved trauma may be more easily triggered or dysregulated by a student’s trauma-related behavior. This matters because educators’ behaviors directly impact the culture within their classrooms. If educators are provided the time and tools to reflect and heal from trauma, they will be more prepared to hold space for the needs of their students and create classroom environments that foster secure attachment and safe social practices.
Attachment Vitamins highlights that children’s environments impact their social-emotional development. As children in the United States and beyond spend a significant amount of time in school, one’s classroom environment is inevitably influential. A healthy classroom may provide safety and structure to students who lack security in other life arenas. Sadly, students who need the most support often struggle to thrive within school systems.
When maladaptive behavior disrupts the safety or learning potential for the self or other students in a classroom, the student exhibiting unruly behavior is commonly reprimanded or removed. These efforts keep educational milestones on track and communicate to children that certain behaviors are inappropriate within a classroom setting. On the other hand, what might these responses tell a distressed child about their sense of value and belonging?
Attachment Vitamins explains that children who are exposed to traumatic environments and experiences are likely to develop maladaptive strategies to communicate their emotional needs to their attachment figures. To remedy these patterns, educators can model secure attachment in their classrooms by facilitating repair after ruptures occur.
When addressing students who exhibit disruptive behavior, educators have an opportunity to ask themselves: what is the emotional need that this child’s behavior is an expression of? Addressing the underlying emotional need behind a student’s maladaptive behavior (rather than just the behavior alone) will help the child feel safe and seen. When children’s behavior does not define their value and time is spent within a supportive classroom environment, students exposed to trauma may develop healthier strategies to express their emotional needs.
In summary, educators benefit from personal reflection, and students benefit from educators who reflect on their emotional needs. Incorporating reflective practices into staff trainings and social curriculum will help children and educators to co-create classroom cultures that foster communication, empathy, and healing.
