How Stress Shapes the Learning of Children

“Pamela Cantor knows first-hand how a child’s environment and early experiences can affect their educational outcomes. She knows this not only because she is a child psychiatrist who has studied how the human brain responds to trauma, but also because she herself was sexually abused as a child. For many years after that experience, she said, she carried ‘deep shame.’”

So begins an online article by Emily Tate and Sydney Johnson on the EdSurge website.

Tate and Johnson explain that “Cantor, who delivered one of the opening keynotes [recently]…at the EdSurge Fusion conference in Burlingame, Calif., described how her own childhood trauma led her to medical school. There, she learned ‘not just the stuff about how our lungs and hearts work, but how we love, how we attach, how we nurture and, most of all, how we heal’…

Cantor emphasized that context is critical to understanding student achievement. A child’s community, family, teachers and health are all part of their identity, she said, and any adverse experiences—from physical, emotional or sexual abuse to early exposure to death, violence or divorce—can shape that…’Stress is not an on or off switch,’ Cantor said. ‘Stress happens at varying intensities for children, and they experience it in different ways.’ For students, stress may manifest in different ways but is sometimes evident through a lack of focus, concentration or interest in school.”

Source: “How Mental Health, Trauma and Stress Shape Educational Outcomes,” by Emily Tate and Sydney Johnson, EdSurge.com, October 2, 2018

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