Belief - "They are upset to begin with but they get used to it." 

Trauma is described by MIND, the mental health charity as 

‘…. when we experience very stressful, frightening or distressing events that are difficult to cope with or out of our control.’

It is defined by the Oxford dictionary as 

‘A deeply distressing or disturbing experience.’

The American Psychological Association describes trauma as 

‘severe and lasting emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience…’

Small children have limited means to tell us about their pain, particularly when they are preverbal - nevertheless we understand them when they are in pain. Small children cry and they seek physical contact. Their crying in strength and volume has a relation to their level of pain and physical contact soothes and serves to nurture their sense of safety. 

A parent’s instinctive and healthy response to their child when they have fallen over and grazed their knee is to offer comfort and soothing as well as to clean and fix the injury. Few people would argue that this response is wrong. Responsive parents are essential to the emotional and physical safety and development of children. 

Most children who attend day nursery as infants demonstrate distress - often not on the first day, but once they realise this means they are being left without their primary carer for several hours and whatever happens their parent is not coming back for a long time. It has become normal and acceptable that at drop off, infants cry and cling and often have to be peeled from their parents. Parents then drive away, probably not feeling too great, but with the help of internal dialogue, reassuring themselves that their infant ‘will be fine.’ We have integrated a practice that causes a great deal of emotional pain to infants and we are choosing to ignore their voices and create narratives that support us in that quest. 

Sometimes, normal, socially accepted responses to our children get reviewed and our thoughts on what is acceptable change, usually because someone realises they are negative practices. Smacking or caning children who were ‘naughty’ used to be a normal form of discipline and of course smacking was meant to and did induce tears - nowadays, happily, we don’t find smacking an acceptable means of educating children, in fact, many would regard it as tantamount to assault. Imagine hitting a child, your own child, so hard they scream their heart out in pain and have bruises that show what you did. Such a parent risks prosecution and having their children removed by social services. And yet, every day, thousands of very young children are subjected to an equivalent emotional pain that leaves emotional, invisible scars. The invisibility of the scars makes them easy to overlook. We dismiss the event as trivial. 

Just imagine for a moment, the kind of event that would need to happen to an adult for the adult response to be screaming with all your might, sobbing uncontrollably, fighting with every bit of your body to protect yourself. Maybe being caught in an earthquake or a landslide or a rape? Such a reaction would denote absolute terror. This is the fight or flight response in full throttle. Because as adults, we know that at the end of the day, the child is unlikely to have come to harm - they will still be in one piece and alive at pick up - we diminish their feelings of absolute terror at being abandoned by their parents. We trivialise the very real feelings of our infants because, from our experienced perspective, they are crying over nothing serious. 

Most children react like this for a period of time at nursery drop off. This response might be repeated for many days, weeks or even months. Because this reaction is so common, it has become ‘normalised’. The narrative society has created goes, ‘they get used to it, they soon settle down.’ As adults, we diminish the pain our very young children are experiencing because we would not sob and scream in the same situation - we consider a few hours to be a short time and we disagree with our children that being away from them for a few hours a day is terrifying. 

I argue that what our children are suffering is daily abandonment. They are suffering trauma on a daily basis. Trauma is when the body does not have the resources to cope with the situation in which it finds itself. The body is flooded with cortisol to chronic levels on a daily basis for many hours a day. At a very early age the stress response is becoming an ingrained way of being. The child is being set up for problems in relationships and with physical and mental health throughout life.

We should compare the sense of loss that infants are feeling both in the daily drop off and throughout the day, with the pain we feel when someone we love dies or leaves us for a new relationship. As adults we can relate to the pain of attachment severance in the breakup of romantic relationships. 

There is an accepted belief that when, after a while infants stop crying - they have become ‘used’ to the nursery environment. I argue that if we look more closely at their subsequent behaviour, we can see plenty of evidence of the next stage of trauma response. Some children become easily angered and aggressive, others become withdrawn and detached. The first group are more likely to demonstrate anger at home and in the world. Hyperactivity, non-compliance and aggression towards parents, siblings, other children are some typical behaviours. Children who are withdrawn are often more compliant and quiet and are misread as being ‘good’ children. Clinging to parents at home is a demonstration of fear of being left but can be misread as being a demonstration of how much the child loves their parents. Indiscriminate over friendliness is an attribute that parents can feel proud of when they interpret it as a child developing good social skills. However this inappropriately early social behaviour is a result of having no secure primary attachment and a willingness to go to anyone who will offer physical contact. When viewed in this way it is easy to see the beginnings of later anxiety and depression as well as the potential for diagnosis of ADHD or Autism for example. 

All these arguments are evidenced in many books and in the next post or posts,  I will identify some such books with their broad arguments about the basic needs of infants and outcomes when these are not met. Properly understanding our children’s needs and how we can best meet them, including under challenging economic and social circumstances, is essential if we are to make changes that will make things better.