Though it may be hard to believe, in some of today's classrooms children are coping with life situations that would make many adults sick to their stomachs. Various scenarios of child abuse and neglect, environmental stressors, and other traumatic experiences qualify many of our children as suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Many teachers who witness the effects of this affliction (PTSD) may not recognize it for what it is or know how to appropriately deal with it, and in their humanitarian impulse to "fix" the problem may in fact do more harm than good.

(For more information on PTSD, go here, here, and here.)


Take the case of an eleven year old girl who, at school, is focused, hard working, still struggles here and there but for the most part is a good student with no major behavior problems. Though the girl shows no physical signs of abuse and has made no mention to anyone at the school that she is a victim of sexual abuse, the keen eye of her teacher suspects as much. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the teacher is correct - that the girl is a victim of sexual abuse.

Understandably the teacher wants to save the child from this terrible situation. The teacher exhausts all legal channels to address the situation to no avail and decides to take it upon herself to "mentor" the little girl with the hope that the girl will confide in her and open a door of opportunity for something to be done. For all intent and purpose, the teacher is operating out of a good heart; however, it is more probable that the teacher will do more harm than good. Let's examine why.

The student is a survivor - having created and implemented coping mechanisms which allow her to function successfully in both environments. If the teacher attempts to "fix" the situation without fully understanding it, the teacher runs the risk of dismantling a structure essential for the student to function in her world, potentially disarming the student of her vital safety armor - rendering the student vulnerable to serious if not irreparable psycho-social-emotional damage.

It is not unlike the soldier caught in the blast of an explosion and survives, though shrapnel is embedded in his chest, dangerously near his heart. A fellow soldier with no experience may see the shrapnel and wish to remove it, thinking it the logical thing to do. By doing so, however, the goodwill of the inexperienced soldier may complicate the injury and in fact lead to the death of his comrade. Without expert knowledge of how to deal with the injury, any assistance may do more harm than good.

Another analogy considers the effect of psychological trauma to a person, where a memory is suppressed to preserve sanity. If someone begins tinkering with the mind of the affected, attempting to recover the memory of a traumatic experience before the affected is ready to deal with it, the damage could be devastating and irreparable.

Should the teacher persuade and convince the student to believe in a solution that does not address all factors at play, and the student lays aside those coping mechanisms vital to her survival in favor of some flimsy construction which only addresses those concerns the teacher is aware of, the teacher has in effect set the student up for failure.

The tools the teacher has taught the student to use are ineffective outside the artificial environment created by the teacher. Within the reality of the student's world outside of school, those tools serve no purpose. The child has been told to believe in a magic that does not work in the real world. She is defenseless. It isn't long before she pays the price for believing in a teacher's fairy tales.

If the student makes it through that hell of a night, she comes back angry at the teacher, for making her believe in a reality that had nothing to do with her own. That child has lost whatever hope she had of life beyond survival, twice traumatized by a situation she had learned to deal with and hardened to distrust any optimism she may encounter in the future. The last of her innocence is destroyed.

Sometimes it is best to leave stuff alone especially if you do not know what it is you are messing with. We can think we know but oftentimes we really do not have a clue. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.