Do it now: Short-term responses to traumatic events

Despite our best prevention efforts, we can’t always protect students from the many stressful and often traumatic experiences they may encounter. In the event of a crisis, the school’s immediate goal is to minimize the negative effect, support coping, accelerate adjustment, and instill confidence in students that school staff members are available to address their needs.

Children will react differently to crises and potentially traumatic events depending on numerous factors, including their developmental stage, cognitive capacity, and skills at managing high levels of stress and anxiety. Some common reactions one might see immediately following a traumatic or crisis event include:

While most students will experience one or more reactions to a traumatic event, some may show no reaction at all. They may not shed tears or show any indication that they have been affected. One cannot assume a student isn’t experiencing distress simply due to a lack of overt or obvious reactions. Similarly, the lack of an obvious reaction doesn’t imply some kind of impairment. In most cases, searching aggressively for reactions in students who appear to be coping well or are indicating that they’re having no difficulties can be counterproductive. For example, after the murder of a student, middle school students bullied a girl because she didn’t cry at the memorial service. The school staff encouraged her to let out her feelings like the other girls so she wouldn’t be picked on. The girl later reported that she was in fact sad about the loss, but didn’t feel comfortable showing her emotions to her peers. Similarly, cultural factors may affect how students display emotions. A group of children in Sri Lanka were reluctant to follow an art directive to draw the emotions they experienced about the tsunami that devastated their country. The children only drew happy faces until teachers asked them to turn over their papers and draw their “inside faces.” Their drawings then portrayed many different emotions.