Designed for all professionals working with parents and families of young children, this practical guide offers comprehensive resources for building trauma-responsive family engagement in your school or program. Throughout this book, you'll find: Evidence-based practices that promote trauma-response family engagement. Exercises and tools for identifying the strengths and learning edges within your program, school, or agency. Vignettes from people and programs striving to create trusting, asset-focused partnerships with families that improve equity and promote culturally responsive practices. Reflective inquiry questions and sample conversations to help you examine your own practices. With concrete examples and easy-to-implement strategies, this critical book helps readers put theory into practice while providing essential support for individuals and groups both new to and experienced with trauma-responsive practices in early childhood.

Trauma-Informed Practices for Early Childhood Educators guides child care providers and early educators working with infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and early elementary aged children to understand trauma as well as its impact on young children’s brains, behavior, learning, and development. The book introduces a range of trauma-informed teaching and family engagement strategies that readers can use in their early childhood programs to create strength-based environments that support children’s health, healing, and resiliency. Supervisors and coaches will learn a range of powerful trauma-informed practices that they can use to support workforce development and enhance their quality improvement initiatives.

Specifically designed for administrators and leaders working in early childhood education, this practical guide offers comprehensive resources for creating trauma-responsive organizations and systems. Throughout this book, you'll find: Exercises and tools for identifying the strengths and areas in need of change within your program, school or agency. Reflection questions and sample conversations. Rich vignettes from programs already striving to create healthier, trauma-responsive environments. The guidance in this book is explained with simple, easy-to-implement strategies you can apply immediately to your own practice and is accompanied by brainstorming questions to help educational leaders both new to and experienced with trauma-informed practices succeed.

This go-to guide for educators helping children who have experienced trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) provides accessible information paired with practical, adaptable strategies.

Trauma-Responsive Strategies for Early Childhood offers an overview of trauma and its impact on young children, as well as specific strategies and techniques educators and administrators can use to create classroom and school communities that improve the quality of care for this vulnerable population. The authors have synthesized research-based information in an accessible way. Focusing on the four different domains of cognitive, language, physical, and social-emotional, the authors use vignettes to explore how trauma can be expressed in the classroom and what teachers can do about it.

The first self-care book designed specifically for the early childhood field, Culturally Responsive Self-Care Practices for Early Childhood Educators is filled with helpful strategies and tools that you can implement immediately. Recognizing that self-care is not one size fits all, the authors present culturally responsive strategies drawn from diverse early childhood staff working in a range of roles across communities and contexts. By tying the importance of educator self-care to goals of social justice and equity, this book advocates for increased awareness of the importance of self-care on both an individual and institutional level. Through key research findings, effective strategies and personal anecdotes, this accessible guide helps readers understand and engage with the critical role self-care and wellness-oriented practices play in creating strong foundations for high quality early learning programs.

With accessible strategies grounded in trauma-informed education and positive psychology, this book equips teachers to support all students, particularly the most vulnerable. It will help them to build their resilience, increase their motivation and engagement, and fulfil their full learning potential within the classroom. Trauma-informed, strengths-based classrooms are built upon three core aims: to support children to build their self-regulatory capacities, to build a sense of relatedness and belonging at school, and to integrate wellbeing principles that nurture growth and identify strengths. Taking conventional approaches to trauma one step further, teachers may create a classroom environment which helps students to meet their own needs in a healthy way and progress academically. Based on the successful Berry Street education strategies pioneered by the authors, this book also includes comprehensive case studies, learning points and opportunities for self-reflection, fully supporting teachers to implement these strategies within the classroom.

Understand the different types of upsets and traumas your child may experience—and learn how to teach them how to be resilient, confident, and even joyful The number of anxious, depressed, hyperactive and withdrawn children is staggering—and still growing! Millions have experienced bullying, violence (real or in the media), abuse or sexual molestation. Many other kids have been traumatized from more “ordinary” ordeals such as terrifying medical procedures, accidents, loss and divorce. Trauma-Proofing Your Kids sends a lifeline to parents who wonder how they can help their worried and troubled children now. It offers simple but powerful tools to keep children safe from danger and to help them “bounce back” after feeling scared and overwhelmed. No longer will kids have to be passive prey to predators or the innocent victims of life’s circumstances. In addition to arming parents with priceless protective strategies, best-selling authors Dr. Peter A. Levine and Maggie Kline offer an antidote to trauma and a recipe for creating resilient kids no matter what misfortune has besieged them. Trauma-Proofing Your Kids is a treasure trove of simple-to-follow “stress-busting,” boundary-setting, sensory/motor-awareness activities that counteract trauma’s effect on a child’s body, mind and spirit. Including a chapter on how to navigate the inevitable difficulties that arise during the various ages and stages of development, this ground-breaking book simplifies an often mystifying and complex subject, empowering parents to raise truly confident and joyful kids despite stressful and turbulent times.

Educators must both respond to the impact of trauma, and prevent trauma at school. Trauma-informed initiatives tend to focus on the challenging behaviors of students and ascribe them to circumstances that students are facing outside of school. This approach ignores the reality that inequity itself causes trauma, and that schools often heighten inequities when implementing trauma-informed practices that are not based in educational equity. In this fresh look at trauma-informed practice, Alex Shevrin Venet urges educators to shift equity to the center as they consider policies and professional development. Using a framework of six principles for equity-centered trauma-informed education, Venet offers practical action steps that teachers and school leaders can take from any starting point, using the resources and influence at their disposal to make shifts in practice, pedagogy, and policy. Overthrowing inequitable systems is a process, not an overnight change. But transformation is possible when educators work together, and teachers can do more than they realize from within their own classrooms.

This book serves as a practical guide for clinicians and other professionals working with children and adolescents exposed to trauma, offering an overview and rationale for a comprehensive approach to trauma-informed assessment, including key domains and techniques. Building on more than 2 decades of work in collaboration with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), the book provides strategies for conducting an effective trauma-informed assessment that can be used in practice to support the treatment planning and intervention process, family engagement and education, and collaboration and advocacy with other providers. As part of APA's Division 56 series, Concise Guides on Trauma Care, the book surveys a range of recommended tools and considerations for selecting and implementing those tools across stages of development and in relation to a child's sociocultural context. The authors also examine challenges that may arise in the context of trauma-informed assessment and suggest approaches to overcome those barriers.