While exposure to complex trauma can adversely affect child development across multiple domains of functioning, the degree of the trauma's impact can change as the child is exposed to different stressors and developmental challenges. Various protective and coping factors, including the child’s supportive relationships, self-esteem, and social competency, will affect how each child fares when exposed to trauma. These factors, whether they are individual factors or family and environmental factors, can help buffer the effects of trauma, strengthening the child’s resilience and competence across various domains of functioning.
Understanding these protective and coping factors is critical to the child welfare practitioner’s ability to respond appropriately to children exposed to trauma, and is key to implementation of trauma-informed practice. It is the responsibility of caregivers, child welfare practitioners, and other professionals to instill and/or enhance these factors in trauma-affected children to the greatest degree possible and set them on a pathway to healing.
There are a variety of critical individual protective and coping factors, or traits, that relate to a child’s resilience and ability to cope with adverse events such as maltreatment and trauma. Many maltreated children possess some of these traits to some degree. They include:
It is important to remember that these protective factors interact differently in different children, and that some trauma-affected children can function fairly competently in some social and emotional areas but not in others.
Unlike a child's individual factors, which are protective and coping factors intrinsic to the child, family and environmental protective and coping factors refer to factors that are generally outside of the child's control, such as the available extended support network. These factors, which relate to a child’s resilience and ability to withstand trauma, include:
These family and environmental protections help mitigate the effects of maltreatment and trauma experiences for a child. However, like individual protections, the family and community supports are present in different degrees for different children, and their interplay in a specific child is complex and varied.