Trauma refers to intense and overwhelming experiences that involve serious loss, threat or harm to a child’s physical and/or emotional well-being. These experience can occur within any given time period and may involve a single traumatic event or many repeated events over the course of time. Trauma has an impact on the maturation of biological as well as psychological processes. Repeated traumatic exposure disrupts the maturing organism’s development of self-regulatory process that can lead to destructive behaviors towards self and others, learning disabilities, dissociative problems and distortion in self-concept and others.
Examples of trauma within the childhood stage can include but are not limited to neglect or abandonment, death of parent, divorce, rape, medical illnesses, witnessing horrific events and unstable family life. Chapter 12 provided a table (Table 12.1) …show more content…
Chapter 12 presents a figure (12.4) titled “A continuum depicting opportunities for preventing child abuse or its long-term outcomes”. The figure depicts intervention efforts to prevent such acts that include universal and targeted prevention. The figure also provides efforts of prevention to prevent the recurrence and impairment to ensure there are less long-term outcomes. Prevention holds as the most successful promise for children with early formations of trauma and stress. The key is a healthy parent-child