Teachers should look out for physical health problems among quieter, well-behaved children, as these could be the only signs that they have suffered trauma, a major conference in Scotland has heard.

US paediatrician Nadine Burke Harris said that, while there was a growing understanding that misbehaviour was a sign of trauma or “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs), there were also other types of symptoms.

“Behaviour is the canary in the coalmine,” said Dr Burke Harris at Making Scotland the World’s First ACE-Aware Nation, a two-day event which started in Glasgow yesterday. The children who exhibited concerning behaviour could be seen as “the lucky ones”, she said, because that behaviour forces people to “work out what’s going on”.

However, there was a danger of other children suffering in silence if they showed no obvious behaviour symptoms - instead, their trauma might manifest itself in physical symptoms such as asthma, rashes and infections.

The risk of children suffering in silence

Dr Burke Harris, who is chief executive of the Center for Youth Wellness in San Franciso, also said that when pupils step out of line, teachers and educators should give them “a place to calm down and where their stress hormones can get back to baseline, instead of resorting to punitive sanctions where you exacerbate the problem”.

Science showed that “safe, stable and nurturing environments are healing - that is undisputable”, she said, and also that “early intervention improves outcomes”.

Dr Burke Harris also noted that “the ACEs movement has caught fire here in Scotland”.

Scotland’s former chief medical officer, Professor Sir Harry Burns, also spoke at the event yesterday, where he criticised superficial attempts to tackle the problems with drugs, alcohol and violence that kill many young people in Scotland.

“Now, we’re not going to fix that [by] reducing the saturated fat content,” said Sir Harry, who called for recognition that deep-rooted social problems require complex and fundamental solutions.

The roots of many young people’s problems in Glasgow, he said, could be traced back several decades to when communities were “destroyed” and families uprooted en masse to be transferred to housing schemes such as Easterhouse, where myriad problems included a dearth of facilities or shops to serve the community.

And he warned that without fundamental solutions to the trauma that is rife in deprived communities around the world, “fringe” politicians such as Donald Trump can instead “leverage” people’s “depths of despair” to attract support.

In August, children’s charity Barnardo’s Scotland called for teachers to receive more training in how to support children who have experienced trauma, after it carried out a study which suggested that many school staff had not been trained on the impact of early trauma and ACEs. 

The charity said that the impact of early trauma and adversity on a child could be “severe and enduring”, whether this is parental divorce or imprisonment, substance misuse, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, bereavement or loss. These early experiences can have “a huge impact on a child’s development, their ability to learn and their mental health and wellbeing”, it warned.