Imaginif

Learning ability in traumatised children

October 9th 2007 by Megan Bayliss in Child Abuse

Family Focus Australia “She is severely traumatised and has a learning disability. There will be an educational and occupational therapy assessment as soon as we can get her settled with a family,” the child protection worker offered helpfully in lay people’s language.

Another foster care placement breakdown and another new foster family to trial their magic skills of help and love. “Poor Jenny,” they say to each other. “All she needs is us to love and help her. Learning disability my foot. This girl is smart. I know by the questions she’s asked. Poor thing has just been surround by a mob of imbeciles who didn’t understand her. We will do better. We will fix her.”

Foster carers often start with an attitude of knowing better than everybody else. To them, foster children just need a little attention. Not trained in psychology or even the effects of trauma on development, the foster parent often makes decisions based on their own need to help, rather than on what the child needs as help (see co dependency and the difference between empathy and sympathy). The foster carer may spend copious amounts of time reading, spelling, doing home work with the child with a learning disability but without the combination of emotionally rich development exercises, the extra curricula school work help may be ineffective.

Understanding the effects of trauma on a child’s brain functioning is paramount to trauma recovery. Early childhood trauma can alter brain growth and functioning. Trauma can cause regression (going back to earlier developmental stages) and forgetfulness around tasks just learned (how to walk/talk/potty/do up buttons). Trauma can mask a child’s true level of academic intelligence and instead wear a Halloween costume like Quasimodo.

When children are focused on keeping themselves safe (yes, even in situations we perceive as already being safe), they may appear to be “zoned out” and unable to soak up the learning at hand and remember facts/figures or what to do. This “zoning out” could well be a chemical and physiological learned response from early trauma exposure. The child may be escaped (dissociated) to their world of fantasy. A world where they look as though they are fully in the present but where their cognitive functioning and emotional commitment has gone off somewhere nice to play.

To understand this inability to remember a little better (read the Affects of Childhood Trauma), it may be helpful to know about memory theory - why do we remember some things and not others? I love this little explanation from Professor Dawn Blasko:

“working memory is closely related to the ability to allocate our attention to the most important things going on. For example, if you are driving down a highway with your children arguing in the back seat, your brain will give priority to the most important thing happening—namely, navigating the busy road in front of you—and ignore less important information like the sounds of bickering kids.”

For a traumatised child focused on staying safe in their nice place, nice and safe with sunshine and butterflies is what they may remember, not the times table, or what comes first in a sentence - a noun or a verb. Despite that the child looks present and sounds present, they often are not. They have trained themselves since childhood to be in two places at once. Bodily and minimal functioning in the present and cognitively and perceived high functioning in another. This is a process of dissociation. This is a process that can mimic a learning disability.

Do you want to help your traumatised child to learn, remember and work at their highest level of intelligence? Most carers do. Focus as much on doing emotional homework as you are on academic homework. Your child has the same learning ability as other children (within similar intelligence levels). Your child may be academically constipated by emotional dumbness. Concentrating on the academics keeps your child dumbed (or perhaps this should be numbed) down. Concentrating on emotional and academic intelligence will help your traumatised child with learning disabilities to relearn.

To learn about games and activities you can play to assist your child’s emotional intelligence, register in Imaginif’s Safety Talk forum to receive a FREE copy of a Protective Behaviour tutorial. In the intuition section there are a range of games to play focused on teaching about feelings. Further, in our sidebar, there is a picture of a poster full of faces. Click on it to be taken to a larger version ready to be printed and used as an emotional intelligence learning tool. Start some emotional intelligence homework with your child this afternoon. See if your child can pick two new feeling words that they didn’t already know and copy what their face and body would look like if they were feeling like that.