Imagine you are walking into an afterschool program.  What do you expect to see?  You might expect to see small groups of children sitting around a table with an adult, playing a game or having a discussion, where all the children are engaged and having fun.  Or perhaps they are in a homework room, with soft lighting, bean bags and small tables, some quietly working in pairs, some reading books from the clearly marked shelves organized by reading level and topic and full of the best children’s books, with a couple adults helping children with homework questions.  This is the program you want your child in.  This is the program you would want to be in.  This is a high-quality program.  In this program, children are building their social-emotional skills, regardless of the level of their skill or the supports they receive from sources in their lives outside of the program.  Its also a program that would be called trauma-informed.

How can an afterschool program become trauma-informed?  The first tenet of trauma-informed programming that I believe an afterschool program needs to learn to apply is stability.  Stability is foundational to establishing an emotional experience in which any kind of potentially disturbing surprises are minimized or virtually absent.  Like many of the tenets of trauma-informed programming, stability can help children who struggle with the social-emotional skills of self-regulation as well as remove potential trauma triggers.  However, while stability may seem like a simple concept to apply to an afterschool program, establishing and maintaining it sufficiently enough to serve children with trauma histories or ongoing experiences requires well-supported supervision and management linked with coordinated professional development opportunities for staff.  When achieved, children can gain insights and the chance to practice and receive feedback about the strategies and skills they need to reach goals and achieve tasks and meet their social and emotional needs-things that non-traumatized people take for granted, like making and keeping good friends, being able to pay attention in class, being able to complete homework, and even being able to be organized.  Surprisingly, many afterschool programs are not able to reach the basic standard of quality of maintaining stability, and thus are not helping, but may be actually hurting children with trauma-related issues in their afterschool programs.  If you would like your afterschool program to develop its capacity to be more trauma-informed, please contact Quinn Wilder at QYDC123@gmail.com.