For ECE Teachers: How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime

This video How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime (Burke Harris, 2015) draws a clear line between Adverse Childhood Experiences and how it affects health long term. The video explains the impact of adversity on children’s brains and how that continues into adulthood as they age. This TED talk was given to an audience of medical professionals, therefore there is a lot of medical jargon that goes beyond the necessary knowledge of an ECE leader. I encourage you to watch the video, but it is an optional resource for this class.

How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetimeChildhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.

WATCH: https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime?subtitle=en

Credits: Red Deer Polytechnic's "Early Childhood Education Leadership Development" Faculty