Exploring trauma- & violence-informed child care: Insights from an exploratory study
Date
2025
Authors
Gerlach, Alison
Moosa-Mitha, Mehmoona
Slemon, Allie
Macasaquit, Mariel
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Victoria
Abstract
Early learning and child care (ELCC) programs and spaces in British Columbia and Canada strive to be inclusive of and responsive to the diversity of communities in which they are located and the families and children accessing their programs. Increasing awareness about the prevalence and impacts of trauma, family violence, and adversity in early childhood has generated attention on trauma-informed and trauma- and violence-informed approaches to early years programs (Bartlett et al., 2017; Lalonde et al., 2020; Ministry of Children & Family Development, 2017). These approaches are becoming integral to many child care programs including programs designed specifically for Indigenous communities and families. However, there remains a lack of evidence in Canada on what it means to take up and embed these approaches into routine child care programming (Slemon et al., under review).
Trauma-informed care (TIC) has been defined as an approach to service delivery that centres trauma awareness and knowledge, its prevalence, and impacts to everyday life. TIC approaches primarily respond to the effects of trauma, ensure safety, build resilience, and prevent re-traumatization to support children and families who have faced traumatic experiences.
TIC tends to focus on trauma experiences and intervention at the level of an individual child and disregard how children’s experiences are compounded by and continuous with broader structural forms of trauma and violence that are beyond a child or family’s immediate environment and control (Gerlach, Browne, Sinha et al., 2017).. In the context of ELCC programs, this individualistic understanding of trauma often translates into targeting individual children’s responses to stress and trauma (Slemon et al., under review).
Trauma- and violence-informed care (TVIC) takes a broader perspective of, and approach to trauma; attending to how some children and families can experience interpersonal family violence, AND/OR structural and colonial forms of violence and trauma, such as systemic discriminatory practices and policies (Representative for Children and Youth, 2024). This broader understanding of trauma requires identifying and transforming taken-for-granted early childhood discourses, policies, practices etc., such as those inherent in the child welfare system, that can, albeit unintentionally, cause harm and trauma for specific child populations while sparing others (Gerlach et al., 2017).
Thus trauma- and violence-informed child care, or TVICC, addresses children’s individual experiences of trauma while also paying attention to the wider systems that interact and play a role in families and children’s lives. This understanding of trauma as structural and societal results in a critical examination of the harms, inequities, and exclusions that systems like the child care, educational, health care, child welfare, and familial and cultural structures, amongst others, may be perpetuating (Gerlach et al., 2017). TVICC involves an organizational change process that aims to move beyond a sole focus on children in a program, to a critical examination of broader factors including child care legislation, policies, quality assurance, dominant discourses, and power relations.