The Calm Between Storms

We have one more week as summer winds down and school has not started yet. I plan to cram the week full of fun, family things to help ease growing anxiety and to create last minute family memories.

Summer Joy – Our Calm

We have had a glorious summer. Outside play, inside play, adventures to parks and beaches and pools, trampoline, bikes, jump ropes and sidewalk chalk… so much packed into every day.

The kids had various adventures separately — from dance classes to swim team, from drama intensive workshop and performances to outings with friends and Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Several kids had visits with biological family members and some of us got in a trip to Oregon.

All of it was relaxed and happy and filled to the brim with love and relationship. We had surprisingly few really big arguments (which is amazing considering there were nine of us in a small 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house) and really not very many truly cranky, irritable days.

Season of Storms

Summers are our best time, primarily because there is no school for this crew of mine. I call every school year our season of storms. School is a very stressful place for my kids and it impacts our family life. Not all the kids are having a hard time all the time, or at the same time, or for the same reason. But school for my children is not the exciting place full of anticipation that it was for me as a child.

Many things from their early lives and some things from the here and now all impact how safe my kids feel at school. That does’t mean they are not safe; it’s a matter of whether they FEEL safe. The actual tenet of school is that children learn things they don’t yet know. That means mistakes, a lot of new things, and constant pushing forward. It entails new people, often a lot of noise, and many adults, all of whom have their own experience, skills, personalities and training. My childrens’ histories of trauma are very much an influence during their school days and how they respond to what is going on around them.

Abuse

The most apparent cause of stress is early abuse. Several of the kids would actually be smacked for making any kind of mistake. There would often be ridicule or verbal abuse for screwing something up. Some of my kids had a complete lack of interest from family adults about whether their children were learning, only whether they made mistakes. Even if the abuse was not school performance related, the fear of making mistakes is deeply ingrained in the fabric of their being. This means that at school, where kids are expected to constantly try new things and often making mistakes, trauma kids spend all day worried about their next mistake. Maybe not consciously, but anxious all the same. This makes it hard for them to truly concentrate, which REALLY impacts their ability to learn new things.

Neglect

Another frequent cause of struggle at school is neglect in their first family. Not necessarily hunger and lack of connection (although those create their own problems in development and growth), but lack of early social interaction, which impacts language development. I see several of my kids struggle with word retrieval (finding the right words), vocabulary (the amount of words that they know and understand), and fluency in communication (ease of back and forth interactions). The children impacted by this also often misinterpret what another person is saying and infers insult or anger where none was intended. This in turn, can impact friendship building skills, reading skills, and definitely writing skills. These children often have problems comprehending what is being taught, sometimes only because they missed so much school early on that they missed critical instruction that current instruction is built on. To put it plainly, they feel stupid because they don’t understand things.

Personality and Coping Skills

We all know that most humans have some innate personality traits. We know people who are shy, introverts, vivacious, extroverts, observers, leaders, peacemakers, etc. Much of this is how each of us was created. All personality types bring gifts to the table.

Each personality has some built in coping preferences to stay at a comfort level, but our upbringing and external forces shape how we cope and interact in different settings. Most of my kids had not learned how to cope with their Big Feelings. They resorted to our human instincts…. flight, fight or freeze…. each in a way that they perceived would keep them the safest.

These coping responses, repeated over and over again, developed strong, strong neurological connections in their bodies and are hard to re-program. This means that every perceived danger or trigger will initiate the cascade of behaviors related to survival. So when a 2nd grade student has a “tantrum” in the classroom, it is actually the fight response from when the child was 2 years old and their life was in danger. Or the withdrawal of a middle-schooler into an apparent ‘pout’ is actually a frozen response from when they were 5 and tried to disappear from the terror around them.

Individual Abilities

The last big impact on school stress is any medical, mental or developmental situation that may or may not have anything to do with the child’s past. For instance, autism, cerebral palsy, ADHD, and visual deficits all have an impact on how stressful the school day (or year) can be for my kids. Each of these impacts one or more of my children.

Sailing Into the Storms

All of the above are basic explanations of one or more reasons why ALL of my kids enter school with trepidation. The longer they are here with a secure home life and constant advocacy, the more they are finding their strengths and their joys in their educational settings. But each year is new and the first month or more is kind of an eggshell period of time when I am watchful to see where new triggers might be, what the skills of their new teachers are, and who their peers, both new and old, are. The anxiety is high in all of the kids, whether they recognize it or not, which means trigger points are lower. And the storms rage on.

Some of my kids play out their triggers at school, using their learned basic coping skills to either act out or shut down. Some of my kids white-knuckle it through the day and come home to explode all over the place, a safe place to let go. Some of my kids do both. Yikes!

I advocated quite a bit in several settings last spring to try to set things up right for this fall and have already contacted some key people for a couple of my kids before school has even started.

Having said all of that, we will step boldly into the new year with a vigilance laced with optimism. I will plan for what I see may be storms, but will search daily for the joy that the kids will bring home in a million small ways… listening for the sparks of friendship, moments of pride or satisfaction, and notes of excitement of what is coming up in their schools. I will take every opportunity to point out growth to each kid…things they can be proud of, either in over-coming their own anxiety and/or in progress within any arena of their academic lives.

Hello School Year!

I mess this up a lot! It is an exhausting time of year for all of us. But I will nurture the joy and growth while mitigating the drama and trauma as we step into a new season of storms. And I will make our home life consistent and nurturing… a place where fun, love and hope can live.

Happy New School Year, my loves. Grow into your new opportunities!

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If you want to read more about any of the kids’ journeys, click on their name under categories to the right –>

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I’d really love to have you along for the journey! Sign up here to get email notes every time I post a new article. There are a lot more stories to come!!!