De-stress Back-to-School with Trauma-Informed Parenting

Everyone has experienced stress in the last year because of the constraints of COVID-19 and ever-shifting CDC guidelines, which only makes this year's back-to-school period more intense.

Ever since the pandemic began, parents in my practice have described aggressive, impulsive, or “numbed out” behaviors in their children and in themselves as a response to this stress. Isolation and inequitable access to basic needs like food, housing, healthcare, and education, all took a toll on mental health. Parents struggled to work from home while monitoring remote learning. Other parents had no options but to travel to work—potentially putting their whole family at risk—and felt exhausted by the hypervigilance involved in keeping everyone safe.

Black and brown people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Police brutality and the historical trauma of racism led to anti-racist uprisings and conflicts. As if that weren’t enough, families have dealt with contentious divides in political ideologies, especially the politicization of pandemic safety measures. The new Delta variant only adds to the stress and uncertainty.

While we know there are mental health benefits to children returning to school, for some parents it can still feel like choosing between your child’s emotional health or their physical well-being. Kids and families may be overwhelmed with the fear that someone they love might get or die, or that they could lose resources allowing them access to food, housing, or health care. Younger kids not yet eligible for a vaccine may be worried about their own safety and that of their unvaccinated peers or siblings.

How can parents help children with their stress or trauma as they transition back to school in such uncertainty, while also managing their own anxiety at the same time?

What is trauma?

Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands, explains that trauma is not an event or an emotional response, but a bodily experience. He describes it as a "spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage."

Your body's protective response to a stressful event or a series of stressful events—real or imagined—overwhelms your ability to cope. Your brain senses danger and tells your body to engage your nervous system’s survival mode. In survival mode, your brain perceives and responds to the world only in terms of good or bad; the ability to perceive nuance and think clearly goes offline. Your nervous system can become mobilized, ready to fight or flee, or...

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