Early Childhood Trauma

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Trauma is a term that has been used to describe an emotional response to a terrible event, that can cause a disruption in someone life. Traumatic experiences can affect anyone at any age. Early developmental trauma or childhood trauma may loosely be defined as any traumatic experience that occurred before the age of 18 years old (Bishop 2014). Life-threatening occurrences could occur along with temporary and chronic issues. Many traumatic events have the potential to cause massive obstruction on neural and physical development (Bishop 2014). Types of trauma include can include life changing events such as divorce, stress, illnesses, disorders, and many more. There are many resources that can assist with traumatic experiences. Some of the options available are therapy, medical assistance, and spiritual influences these can all play a part in the healing process of trauma. Religion has played a significant role in helping …show more content…

There are many ways that trauma may affect the developing brain. Certain types of traumatic events, such as abuse or neglect, may cause direct injury to the brain, some examples are injury to the head or malnutrition. Infants and young children have less coping resources to handle stress, this can be contributed to their immaturity and dependence on their caregivers. Caregivers have a major role in fostering their children’s cognitive development. Having characteristics such a being sensitive, warm, consistent, and empathic is key. Finally, for many children, trauma exposure can lead to emotional issues, like depression and stress disorders such as PTSD (Hovens, 2012). This can also be applied for very young children and these difficulties can be disruptive with learning new skills. This can make it harder to pick up new cognitive

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