10 Things to Know About Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) - Part 1

I am super excited to be here this morning to talk to you about what I think is the single most important issue for our community today and so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about adverse childhood experiences which is trauma and childhood talk about trauma-informed care talk about the connection between all of those things to health which is what got me interested in this in the first place but also to just you know long-term outcomes for children adolescents and adults adverse childhood experiences so there has been a lot of research on aces what they are and I am old school so some of you who may have heard that there are 16 different types of aces are going to be like wait they're supposed to be 16 the research is most compelling around these 10 and so I am going to talk to you about these 10 things aces fall into two basic categories on one hand you've got abuse and neglect and whether it's physical emotional or sexual abuse or neglect that's half of the equation and unfortunately what people tend to assume is that that's the entire equation but there's another half that we call household dysfunction and those are experiences that children have in their homes if for example there is substance misuse in the home if there is a parent who's been incarcerated if there's divorce if there's domestic violence so all of those things make up the other half of the equation put them all together and those are our 10 aces so let's look at what we mean when we start asking people questions about their experiences with early childhood trauma or adverse childhood experiences and so you can see from this slide the the questions that people answer when they're determining what their ace score is now at this point in my presentation I like to pause and recognize that this is going to be a little uncomfortable for about a third of us right because I'm going to show you all of the different questions associated with determining what your adverse childhood experience or your ace score is and you're going to start start counting and you're gonna have what I call a holy cow moment because you're gonna realize that you have a pretty high score and that's okay this presentation is going to leave you feeling good that doesn't mean that there's not going to be a little bit of a roller coaster ride on our way to get there and it's okay but I just I want you to kind of sit with that for a minute and be okay with that so when you think about the questions to determine the ACE score here exactly what those questions are so and and I have another slide that talks about the research around this but for the purposes of a lot of the research associated with what we know this is retrospective so these are questionnaires given to adults who are answering it as they think about their childhood there's another use for an a screening tool that can be done with parents of children and we're going to talk about that in a little bit so did a parent or other adult in your household swear it you insult you put you down humiliate you or made you feel like maybe they might hurt you so that if if there's a yes to any of that that's a one and then you go through each of those questions so here's the first four but you can get the the theme right did anyone in your household did you feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you are important or special here's the next set of questions did you feel like you didn't have enough to eat or that you had to wear dirty clothes or that you didn't have anybody to protect you and so this is a more nuanced way at getting at so for example y'all know when children are living in households with parents who are addicted to substances this is often an outcome or a result of that and so these questions get at the the more nuanced areas associated with that so when adults are going through this a screening they go through and they answer all of those questions if they answer yes to any of the questions answered for each of the numbers they give themselves once one point and you can get a score of anywhere from zero to ten and so basically if you do the math and you add up your score you'll get your a score of zero to ten and when you look at the original study that was done around aces you can see that what they found was the vast majority of people in the United States had at least one ace and that over 12% had four or more how to score a four or more and this is important when I start showing you some of the connections between your a score and later outcomes in life I will tell you that I love to give this talk I give it when it's a good week I give it twice a week and one of my favorite audiences to talk to our early childcare providers and when I have enough time as part of the presentation I will give everybody in the audience the ACE test and let them fill it out as part of the presentation and they don't put their name on it or anything like that but then they turn it all in and magical fairies go to the back of the room and they count up the scores for everybody and at the end of the presentation I will let them know how the rooms ace scores compared to this general population study and without fail so you can see about 12% have four or more aces without fail in our early childcare providers its 33% yeah and I think that that's really telling for us as a community that people who have experienced difficult childhoods are motivated to work with children to help them have better childhoods so the motivation is great and many of them have gone through the process to heal from their trauma but some of them haven't and so that's why I like to give this presentation especially to them so that they can think about what their childhood did for the development of their brain what these kids childhoods are doing for the development of their brains but the other thing is yesterday I was doing an interview about aces and the interviewer was like well those people shouldn't be working with children and I was like no no no you're missing the point when people who've experienced childhood trauma grow up heal from that trauma and are able to work with those kids they have the best set of skills to help those kids do well additionally their childhood experiences have left them with an incredible gut an incredible ability to read the room to understand what's going on around them to react to needs that most of us are just oblivious to and so it makes them absolutely the perfect folks to work with kids so if you went through and you did your ace score and you're like oh no I've got a four it's okay you are absolutely in the right place the thing I do want to point out about this study is this was a study done by Kaiser Permanente which is a health insurance provider which means that every single person who completed this survey was solidly middle-class employed and had health insurance not exactly representative of the general population but still it was mind-blowing for researchers at the time to even see this level of trauma and childhood so why don't we care about aces we care about aces because aces caused toxic stress and here I want to differentiate between three basic types of stress that kids experience so the first kind of stress is what I call good stress or positive stress and that's let's say you're in second grade and you have a spelling test tomorrow and you're studying for that spelling test and you studied really really hard and you're confident that you know how to spell all those words and you go to school in the morning and you sit down to take the spelling test and your heart's beating a little bit faster and your palms are a little bit sweaty and you're nervous that you're gonna make a mistake because you really studied super hard and you want to do well that's a stressful situation for a second grader but it's good stress that's the kind of stress we want our kids to experience then there's what they call tolerable stress or just bad stress an example of that would be the first time a young child experiences the death of a loved one so the his grandfather passes away and this isn't anything he's ever experienced before this is a very stressful situation for that young child however in those types of situations typically there are adults in that child's life who can help him understand that what he's feeling is normal and what to expect next there are traditions in the community that show the child that there are a lot of other people who are sad too and they're showing that and that that's okay and so there are a lot of things in our community that help children deal with the death of grandpa in a way that is healthy and a learning experience for them on how to deal with bad stress toxic stress on the other hand has two characteristics one its capricious so these kids don't know when this bad thing is going to happen they just know from experience that it has happened a number of times before and two there isn't an adult in that child's life to help mitigate or explain that stress so if you look at the example of domestic violence right so if if there's domestic domestic violence in the household and dad is beating mom that's a stressful situation for that child he can't ask dad why he's beating mom because he's afraid of dad he can't ask mom why dad is beating her because he can tell that she's very embarrassed she's very upset about it and he doesn't want to make her feel worse so he starts to internalize that stress and doesn't have anybody to help him process that that's what we're talking about with toxic stress you

Channel: Clarity Child Guidance Center

Views: 42,594

Keywords: Clarity Child Guidance Center, children's mental health, Claritycon2019, adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, trauma, Colleen Bridger, childrens mental health

Id: Z8db4x4vjCE

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019