Toxic Stress and Its Impact on Kids

For twenty-five years as my family and I were living alongside our neighbors in a historically disinvested neighborhood in our city, we had the privilege of being asked to foster a child from the school my wife was teaching at who was being removed from his home along with his siblings. This young man (we will call him Fernando) had suffered significant challenges and trauma at home, but he was also growing up having experienced multiple evictions, his home was broken into twice, and many of the few possessions they had were stolen, he frequently had to school with disheveled and dirty clothes and without breakfast and when he would go outside to escape, no real safe public spaces like parks or places to hang out. Collectively, these frequent and varied events and experiences created prolonged activation of his stress response systems. This kind of prolonged activation can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and, according to Harvard's Center on the Developing Child, increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment. They named these prolonged experiences, Toxic Stressors.

For Fernando, toxic stress was something his body and brain had been dealing with throughout his life, experiencing trauma after trauma. The one bright consistent thread throughout nearly all of his life was the support from caring adults at his school. For him, one saving grace was that he never had to change schools. It was his school counselor who called us asking my wife if we would assist, for at this school this was all-to-common of an occurrence and a response. We were not alone. Numerous teachers and staff had also stepped up in similar ways. For Fernando however, it became clear that there existed a lasting impact on his cognitive and socio-emotional development that, at the age of 11, was going to be a very challenging proposition for him and those supporting him would have to overcome.

 So often when we see the supposed low performance of schools in low-income communities we easily jump to a sort of blame game. We often tend to concede that this is "just how it is" as if these performance issues are merely a result of a series of bad choices and that concentrated lack of opportunity neighborhoods are inevitable - but they don't have to be. When we better understand what is the impact and driving causes of so many of the challenges kids are facing, we can only then begin to start to put the weight of the solution solely on our schools, the parents of the children, or the array of social service providers available to help. Only when we begin to understand the impacts that place and segregation of wealth have on kids and their odds of success can we truly begin to interrogate the solution. 

 At Cerca Solutions, we are working to help communities across the country better understand the complexities of their challenges and how to create holistic and nuanced efforts that drive toward solutions. This is the first of many thought pieces to come. Follow us on LinkedIn to join the conversation, and please add your comments below. Also, check us out on our website at www.cerca.solutions to learn more about the services we provide.