Understanding trauma and how it can influence behaviour

Supporting children with challenging behaviour is among the most important and demanding work early childhood teachers do, but it can be stressful. Children often express deep distress in ways that feel confusing or hard to manage, and many kaiako experience compassion fatigue or secondary trauma. Our webinar with experienced educator Lucy Wood explored the causes of trauma unique to the context of Aotearoa New Zealand and the impact of trauma on children’s behaviour, as well as how teachers and kaiako might respond to challenging behaviours with compassion.

Trauma is experienced when an event overwhelms a person’s ability to cope. It is not a uniform response to a specific set of events that can be categorised as traumatic, but depends on an individual’s perception of and response to an event, as well as their resilience, context, and the coping systems available to them. This means that what is traumatic for one person may not be for another, and we cannot assume trauma exists or doesn’t exist based on our understanding of the event.

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Trauma can occur as the result of being the subject of or witness to any kind of violence – physical, emotional, or sexual. It can be the result of neglect, poverty, conflict, war, natural disasters, and pandemics. There is also increasing recognition of intergenerational trauma, and the traumatic experiences of parents, grandparents, and ancestors being passed on to children through learned behaviours, family systems and culture, and epigenetics. Causes of trauma unique to Aotearoa include the ongoing effects experienced by Māori of their colonisation, land loss, urbanisation, and cultural alienation. This trauma can be seen in the way that Māori are over-represented in the criminal justice system, health system, and child protection system.

Even very young children can be subject to trauma. While it may be thought that babies and pēpi, and particularly pēpi in utero, may be too young to understand events and thus protected from trauma, in fact research shows that, because of their physical (in the case of pēpi in utero, where the stress hormone cortisol is shown to cross the placenta) and emotional connection, babies experience the same effects of stress and trauma as their parents. Trauma in early childhood is extremely important to address, because pre-birth and in the first 1000 days of life, children’s brains are being wired up according to the data they receive at that time.

Children’s behaviour as a result of trauma can be overtly challenging, or more subtle but still harmful. Challenging behaviours that result in disruption or harm for the person or those around them can be seen as expressing an unmet need. Challenging behaviours as a trauma response might include hypervigilance (often mislabelled as ADHD), defiance, aggression, withdrawal, separation anxiety, extreme shyness, and daydreaming or disassociating. These flight, fight, and freeze responses can be frequent, intense, and dangerous, and so need to be effectively addressed. It is also important to note that behaviours usually praised as ‘good’ can represent a trauma response too. Some children, rather than fight or freeze, display a fawn response to protect themselves from perceived threat. Fawn responses focused on compliance and deliberately going ‘under the radar’ can be harder to spot.

A trauma-informed lens can be helpful for challenging behaviour, but this does not mean limiting other perspectives on children’s behaviour. A trauma-informed lens usefully shifts the focus from ‘what is wrong with you?’ to ‘what happened to you?’, and is really powerful in helping to reduce negative labelling. For example, aggression can be seen as a child fighting for survival rather than being deliberately disruptive, and hoarding food can be seen as the result of a child having spent a portion of their life going hungry, rather than about being greedy or unable to share. The importance of creating psychological safety by fostering connections and trust in trauma-informed approaches aligns well with the emphasis on relationships and whanaungatanga in early childhood education and is a crucial foundation for working with children with challenging behaviour. The focus on building resilience is also good for all children, even those without trauma. However, challenging behaviours can stem from other causes such as food intolerances, testing boundaries, and learning to regulate emotions, so it is important not to overlook these other possibilities.

A trauma-informed approach isn’t about excusing challenging behaviour, but about understanding causes and providing support that will work. Trauma does not just affect children’s behaviour, but every facet of their lives, growth, and development, and can continue to negatively affect children’s lives if unaddressed. Trauma-informed pedagogies promote effective interventions such as relational healing and breathwork, which are much more effective for dysregulated children than punishment or exclusion. Trauma-informed approaches also prevent re-traumatisation for children, because kaiako come to understand children’s triggers, minimising exposure and slowly reintroducing them in tolerable doses. For example, children whose trauma is triggered by loud noises can be protected from and warned about potential loud noises at first, before moving closer to the source of loud sounds, and then perhaps playing with materials to make loud sounds themselves. Neuroplasticity means that children’s brains are malleable, and can rewire and heal from trauma particularly with the provision of small, manageable doses of stress.

Indigenous approaches to supporting trauma can be helpful. Māori, like many other indigenous and marginalised communities across the world, have historically understood the importance of human connectedness, and the importance of supporting each other with whanaungatanga, connection to the environment, karakia, ritual, and rhythm.

To begin using a trauma-informed approach with children with challenging behaviour that may be a trauma response, kaiako can firstly look at their own internal bias and the way that they are currently viewing the behaviour, avoiding taking the behaviour at face value. It can be helpful to change the questions asked: not ‘what is wrong with this child?’ but ‘what happened to them?’. It is also important for kaiako to look at their response to the behaviour, and what happened to them, their parents, grandparents, and ancestors that is affecting their response to the behaviour, and ensure that they can be regulated enough to approach the situation. Critical reflection is essential to ensure that kaiako can challenge practices that may be entrenched but not supporting tamariki.

Humans are relational creatures and experience relations with others nervous system to nervous system. While this means that a kaiako can help regulate a child using their own regulated nervous system, it also means a child’s dysregulated and challenging behaviour may cause the kaiako distress. There can be secondary trauma (trauma caused by exposure to the trauma of another person) and compassion fatigue (emotional, physical, and psychological exhaustion as a result of prolonged exposure to others’ trauma and distress).

Trauma-informed approaches are beneficial not only for tamariki but for kaiako. Trauma-informed approaches are highly relational, deepening trust and collaboration in early childhood settings. Kaiako who have had trauma-informed training are more confident to manage complex needs and behaviours, leading to less escalation and more regulation. An understanding of trauma can help reduce burnout and stress for kaiako, as they come to frame challenging behaviour not as a personal attack but as a survival response. It is important to be able to approach a situation fully equipped and well-regulated, to support tamariki without risking compassionate fatigue and secondary trauma.

Further resources

McTaggart, J. (2026). Trauma-informed Practice in Early Education. Making a Lifetime’s Difference. Routledge.

Perry, B. D., & Szalavitz, M. (2011) Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered. Mariner books.

Perry, B. D. (2006). The Boy who was Raised as a Dog. Basic books.

Perry, B. D., & Winfrey, O. (2021) What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. Flatiron Books: An Oprah Book.

Williams, J. (2026). Your Trauma has a Whakapapa.

Trauma Informed Educators NZ on Facebook

The following are not specifically about trauma-informed practice, but illustrate the way that colonisation has perpetuated inter-generational and language trauma in Aotearoa:

Iti, T. (2025). Mana. Allen & Unwin NZ.

McRoberts, M. (2025). Speaking my Language: Te Kōrero i Toku Reo. Harper Collins.

Te Moke , T. (2025). The Unlikely Doctor. Allen & Unwin NZ.