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1. Resilient Educator, "Trauma-Informed Strategies to Use in Your Classroom." Available: https://resilienteducator.com/classroom-resources/trauma-informed-strategies/

2. Bear, Thelma, Sherry Schenk and Lisa Buckner (1993), "Supporting Victims of Child Abuse." Available: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec92/vol50/num04/Supporting-Victims-of-Child-Abuse.aspx

3.

Agency for Persons with Disabilities, "Common Signs and Symptoms of Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation." Available: https://apd.myflorida.com/zero-tolerance/common-signs/#/

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Response Strategy for students experiencing Physical Neglect

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Response Strategy for students experiencing Physical Neglect

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-Intentionally build a close relationship with the student, and acknowledge them daily so they feel valued, and that they have someone who cares about them.
-Work with the student to help them develop a strong sense of personal identity. The teacher can incorporate questions which urge the student to take positions and recognize their value and values.
-Report the incident to the school counselor, and set up an intervention where the student is given a safe, clean place to rest, shower,  do basic hygiene, etc before and after school
-Work with the administration and counselor to provide free or heavily discounted breakfasts and lunches to ensure that the student is receiving proper meals and nutrition
-Offer childcares services to the parents, or enroll the child in afterschool programs
-Suggest parent training programs so that the parents can learn how to provide for their child's physical needs, or if they are absent, how to get assistance with childcare services
-If needed, work with the administration to contact Child Protective Services to ensure the physical safety of the child.

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Dehydration

Poor or improper hygiene, such as dirty clothes because do not know how wash their own garments

Poor grooming (e.g., overgrown fingernails and toenails; uncut, matted, or unclean hair; unshaven facial hair, body crevices caked with dirt)

Student is inappropriately clingy, or fears being left alone

Malnourishment/weight loss

Acting out in class and attention-seeking due to absence of parents

A smell of urine or feces on the person

Poor skin condition or skin breakdown (such as rashes, bedsores, or open wounds)

Lack of necessary adaptive aids such as glasses, hearing aids, leg braces walkers etc. or improper medication management

Needed medical and dental care (including the administration of prescribed drugs) not provided

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- Establish Routines: Create predictability and reliability in the child's day through schedules and common routines.
- Make Emotional Connections: Have the student participate in journal writing or private conferences to express and acknowledge his/her feelings. Do frequent "check-ins."
- Creativity: Encourage drawing, writing, or other avenues of creative expression.

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- Absenteeism
- Repeating a grade
- Lower school engagement
- Behavior: isolating; passive/quiet; frequent somatic symptoms like tummy aches, headaches, or fevers; regressive behaviors like bed-wetting or baby talk; aggressive and/or mean behaviors.

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- Goal Setting: Help the student view his/her future in a positive way and help him/her make responsible decisions regarding his/her future.
- Creativity: Give the student time to process and become self-aware of his/her feelings and give them opportunities to express those feelings in a creative way, perhaps through art or writing.
- Maintain relationships: IF ALLOWED, encourage the student to use their creativity skills (drawings/ writings, etc.) to maintain contact with the incarcerated parent.

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Coping With Incarceration | Sesame Street in Communities

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With adults' love and support, kids can cope with the incarceration of a loved one.

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Aftunion. (2020, September 10). Understanding the Needs of Children with Incarcerated Parents. American Federation of Teachers. https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2019/turney.

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- Multiple school absences
- Grade retention
- Suspension/expulsion
- Low test scores
- Internalizing problems (e.g., experiencing feelings of worthlessness or inferiority)
- Externalizing problems (e.g., engaging in fights and bullying)
- Attention problems (e.g., engaging in impulsive behavior and being unable to sit still)

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A household member being incarcerated is an ACE ( Adverse Childhood Experience ).

The ACE study's definition of incarceration "Did a household member go to prison?" is straightforward, but it's worth explaining why this is an ACE.

First, the act of seeing someone you love arrested by the police, handcuffed, and led into a police car is traumatic for a child. If the parent who's arrested is the child's only caretaker, the child is going to need to live with someone else, likely either a grandparent or a perfect stranger. All the adults in the child's life are likely to be fixated on what the arrested relative did and what can be done to get them out, or on what life without this person will be. Depending on what the family member did, the age of the child, and the nature of the school district the child attends, it is possible the child will be subjected to teasing or bullying if the arrest is newsworthy.

If the relative goes to prison, which implies a conviction and a longer sentence, the above disruptions become long-term. The family may face a significant loss of income if the arrested person was the sole or main earner, and that may result in a new school district, new neighborhood, etc. If a child is placed into foster care and the parent is sentenced to longer than 18 months they may lose their parental rights and their child could be adopted away from them. There can be a significant stigma associated with an arrested relative, depending on what the relative did and the nature of the school district. And a household member disappearing from a child's life, for any reason, is a trauma.

Our nation's criminal justice system simply is not going to disappear because arresting parents is bad for children. But we can look at policies that involve arresting fewer. Much attention is being paid, nationally, to mass incarceration policies related to the "war on drugs". Things like marijuana legalization, decriminalization, and changing sentencing guidelines have already been adopted in many states and are being considered in many others. Diversionary courts for people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness, and some other low-level crimes have sprung up across the nation; these courts vacate or prevent convictions if the arrested person completes specific actions (for example, drug rehab and therapy) that are designed to help the root of the problem and prevent further offenses.

On a smaller scale, Maternal Home Visiting programs reduce the likelihood of arrest in participating families by reducing their drug use, improving their economic self-sufficiency, and guiding them away from unhealthy relationships.

A promising, but unproven, set of programs may be able to keep parental incarceration from being an ACE for some children. Prison nurseries are being used in a few female correctional facilities across the country. In these programs, pregnant women who are arrested receive prenatal care and are able to keep their child with them, for up to the first two years of the child's life. Much of their mother's day revolves around caring for her baby, with supervision, and learning about parenting, and preparing for reentering society with enough support in place that she and her baby will be OK. These programs appear to drastically decrease the mother's risk of re-arrest; their effects on the baby are less well known. Even if the mother can't be released by the baby's second birthday and the baby has to be placed with someone else, the child has still formed a single, healthy attachment, which is a major factor in their own resilience and healthy neurodevelopment.

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A household member being incarcerated is an ACE ( Adverse Childhood Experience ). The ACE study's definition of incarceration "Did a household member go to prison?" is straightforward, but it's worth explaining why this is an ACE. First, the act of seeing someone you love arrested by the police, handcuffed, and led into a police car is traumatic for a child.

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Parental mental illness is an ACE ( Adverse Childhood Experience ).

The ACE study defines parental mental illness as "Was a household member depressed or mentally ill or did a household member attempt suicide?" The point is that a child growing up in the house had to be aware of the parent's mental illness; a diagnosis that was shared between a parent and a psychiatrist and managed so effectively that the child never knew about it is not an ACE, and this is the goal of keeping a parent's mental illness from becoming an ACE.

The term "mental illness" is enormously broad and can range from illnesses like schizophrenia that completely change someone's perception of reality, to mood disorders like depression that can cause episodes of crippling emotional dysregulation to eating disorders to neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's.

Mental illnesses can be caused by a wide variety of things including trauma, environmental, and genetic factors. Mental illness as an ACE is caused when a parent's mental illness is not properly treated and the symptoms of it affect their child's life.

The vast variety of mental illnesses can cause a huge variety of impairments. Mood disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, and bipolar disorder can cause parents to have too little energy, or too much, to properly connect with their child and meet their emotional needs.

Postpartum depression is a specific type of depression that is linked to maternal stress, details of the pregnancy and delivery, and some other factors. It is strongly linked to poor maternal bonding and a higher risk of abuse and neglect, and it carries so much shame and stigma with it that mothers may be reluctant to seek help for it.

All mental illnesses can make holding down a job and running a household difficult. Many people who suffer from mental illness learn to " self medicate " with street drugs or alcohol, and this can pose the risk of addiction and arrest.

Schizophrenia, and other diseases with related symptoms, can cause delusions and hallucinations and tends to cause paranoia. It can cause very irregular and sometimes violent behavior because the sufferer cannot properly comprehend the world around them.

Mental illnesses vary in severity and in treatability, and because of that, it is unwise to say that any particular diagnosis makes someone unfit to parent. If a parent is able to emotionally engage with their children, make sound judgments about their care, run a household and work with professionals in order to manage the mental illness in question, they are not generating an ACE. If a parent has drastically struggled with these things in the past building a support network and possibly supervision becomes important.

Maternal home visiting programs prevent parental mental illness from becoming an ACE. Maternal home visitors can connect their families with local resources, provide the emotional support they need to sustain treatment, and can help unravel some of the thinking errors that involve children that parents tend to develop (such as "I've already ruined my baby's life", "the baby is doing that because he hates me like everyone else does" or "the baby will be better off without me"). Of course, there need to be appropriate mental health resources in a community for this to work; that means everyone in every community having access to appropriate, high-quality mental health care.

Prenatal care providers can also play a role in connecting a pregnant woman with quality mental health care, and many healthcare providers are incorporating screening for postpartum depression into their standard practices.

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Parental mental illness is an ACE ( Adverse Childhood Experience ). The ACE study defines parental mental illness as "Was a household member depressed or mentally ill or did a household member attempt suicide?"

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Children, Violence, and Trauma—Interventions in Schools

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- help children gain a sense of personal identity by asking questions that help them formulate a position on issues
- administer interest inventories
- teach them decision-making and problem-solving skills.
- refer to school counselor if needed

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UNESCO (20/06/2019) "Education as healing: addressing the trauma of displacement through social and emotional learning," Available: https://en.unesco.org/gem-report/node/2904

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- Establish yourself as a "safe person" the child can talk to
- Find psychosocial support avenues to offer to the child and the family
- Implement Social and Emotional Learning programmes (SEL)
- Create stable, predictable class routines to create a sense of safety and control
- Encourage creative expression (Healing through art activities)
- Implement executive function activities (games that coordinate memory, emotion and motor movement)
- Meditation and breathing exercise as a form of stress management

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- Shows feelings of helplessness, despair, fear
- Clinginess, sudden crying without an apparent cause
- Age-inappropriate behaviours (thumb-sucking, bathroom accidents)
- Delays in language development
- Memory problems
- Vomiting, stomachaches, headaches
- Sadness
- Inability to process new information

Among adolescents:
- Anxious, depressed, angry, unable to concentrate
- Substance abuse

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Situation: Refugee/ forced migration trauma

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Situation: Refugee/ forced migration trauma

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Understanding Refugee Trauma | Switchboard

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This resource includes four fact sheets designed for primary care providers, mental health professionals, school personnel, and those working in or with the child welfare system, and what considerations they need to take into account when working with refugee youth and their families. These fact sheets describe the cultural, child and youth, family, school, and ...

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Cousins, Megan and Melinda Callary (n.d.) "Domestic Violence: An Important Issue for Schools," Available: https://research.avondale.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1119&context=teach

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- Talk to the student in a private (safe) space and build rapport as someone the student can talk to
- Find out the school policy and guidelines regarding this situation and implement it accordingly
- Consult the school counsellor
- Increase the student's sense of control in the classroom by offering choices & building their sense of security
- Model non-violent and pro-social behaviours and demonstrate peaceful problem solving
- Minimize competition in the class; encourage cooperation and participation
- Give alternative ways for the child to complete work

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Anxiety and depression

Substance abuse problems; self harm

Fatigue

Difficulty forming friendships

Lack of interest in daily activities

Detachment or withdrawal

Low self-esteem

Aggressive or disruptive in sudden bursts of anger

Problems concentrating

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Situation: Exposure to domestic violence in the family

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Situation: Exposure to domestic violence in the family

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- Build a positive, dependable relationship with the student
- Teach character strengths. The teacher can help students identify and practice their strengths, such as kindness, creativity, and bravery
- Build resilience skills. Teach students to be assertive, set boundaries, and verbalize their feelings.

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For some students, school is not just a place of learning and growth but also a refuge from abuse.

Data suggest that, on average, every classroom has at least one student affected by trauma. According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, close to 40 percent of students in the U.S. have been exposed to some form of traumatic stressor in their lives, with sexual assault, physical assault, and witnessing domestic violence being the three most prevalent.

These types of stressors, known as complex trauma, have the added wound of being perpetrated by a person with whom the child or teen has an ongoing relationship. The very people who are supposed to support and protect are those who wound and abuse. This leads to continuing states of grief, loss, abandonment, and neglect as well as persistent anxiety, fear, and depression-all at a time when the brain is in crucial stages of development.

For some young people, school is the only place in their lives where they know they are safe and can form trusted, enduring relationships. It is, therefore, a cruel irony that many students who are affected by trauma also have trouble engaging at school. They may attend school with the best of intentions, hoping to form friendships, feel connected to their teachers, and succeed at the day's tasks. Yet they can find themselves defiant, demanding, and disengaged -unable to learn and confused about why they can't relate and bond with others.

What do the latest scientific findings from the fields of traumatology, neuroscience, and positive education tell us about how to best help students who are affected by trauma? Below, we highlight some of the new practices that teachers can use to not only help students heal but also help them grow.

Healing and repair

The new field of "trauma-informed learning" has made great strides in helping teachers to better understand the developmental, emotional, and social challenges that students who are impacted by trauma face at school. While teachers are not mental health professionals, trauma-informed learning trains teachers in therapeutic approaches that can be woven into the classroom to redress the delayed development, underdeveloped neural pathways, and over-regulated nervous systems that students experience as a result of trauma.

For example, teachers can directly teach students about their body's own stress activation response and help them find techniques to regulate their heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure. Teaching through rhythm-for example, learning about math to the beat of a drum, reading an English text while riding an exercise bike, or having a disciplinary conversation while walking around the school yard together-is now an accepted classroom technique that assists trauma-affected students to regulate their nervous system through rhythmic movement.

Feeling calmer in class has the knock-on effects of helping students get along better with others, think more clearly, and stay on task. These approaches nurture students' stamina and persistence, allowing them to better deal with frustration, which benefits their social behavior in class and their capacity to take on greater academic challenges. This is indeed a hopeful approach.

Growth and strength

Trauma-informed education has helped teachers to evolve from the question of "What is wrong with this student?" to "What has this student been through?" In the field of positive psychology, we add a further question: "What does this student need to reach their potential?" This allows teachers to extend the focus from what is wrong, to what is needed, to what is possible. Building the mental health and academic capacities of students affected by trauma requires more than repairing psychological disorder and developmental delays-it requires the dual mantra of healing and growth. Of repairing and rising up.

Research by Corey Keyes shows us that healing and growth can be simultaneous processes. We don't always need to wait until something is fixed before we work on building our strengths. Indeed, growing the psychological strengths of a student affected by trauma can be a core part of healing their psychological struggles.

Working with students who are affected by trauma requires schools to assist in providing individual counseling services, safety and crisis planning, behavior plans, self-care plans to address triggers, and case management. Most of these services are not provided by the classroom teacher, yet the teacher is the person who spends the most time with trauma-affected students. A key way in which positive psychology adds to the trauma-informed strategies above is by empowering teachers in the classroom to help their students on a daily basis.

Here are five teaching techniques that you can use in your class, knowing that these approaches also assist your mainstream students.

1. Positive relationships. Trauma-affected students have more relationship challenges to navigate than most. These students can be dealing with harmful relationships at home and then come to school to manage relationships not only with their teachers but also with social workers, police officers, and clinicians-all while living out their daily lives.

It is critical that we help these students feel safe and trusting where possible, so they learn to develop social intelligence and seek out positive bonds with others. Teachers may be the only people who help these students learn what a healthy, supportive relationship feels like. Building relational trust involves simple teaching practices such as smiling, sharing parts of your life with your students, getting to know your students as individuals, and using yourself as a role model of a reliable and regulated adult.

2. Positive physical space. The physical layout and look of your classroom can be used to build positive emotions. Putting up positive visuals and quotes can inspire creative thinking and teamwork in your students. Increased natural light or soft lighting can enhance an open, warm, and relaxing environment.

Consider how the furniture and seating is arranged in your class. Is it helping students to feel safe and connected? You could also bring plants into the room or create a mindfulness corner, a dedicated space that students can visit when they need to regulate their stress response. The corner can include a bean bag, mindful coloring books, squeeze toys, noise-cancelling headphones, and more.

3. Positive priming. Following the research of Barbara Frederickson, you can use simple priming techniques to foster positive emotions such as contentment, pride, awe, and wonder in class.

Brain breaks are one helpful technique. The teachers who work with us have found that brain breaks are most effective when students reflect on the type of energy they need at that moment for learning: Escalating brain breaks build positive energy and emotions such as joy, happiness, and wonder (e.g., clapping games, thumb wars, laughter yoga, racing around the desk), while de-escalating brain breaks build calm emotions such as contentment and serenity, which help a student to feel safe and focused (e.g., silently tracing the movements of a partner, triangle breathing, playing music or repeating mantras, and body movements such as shoulder shrugging or pumping your toes inside your shoes).

You can also use positive primers to boost positive emotion when students first enter the classroom (such as by greeting them with the healthy touch of a handshake or a high five), during transitions (by turning transition routines into a silent game such as "follow the leader"), or during independent work breaks (by having students deliberately savor their accomplishment and share with a peer).

According to Fredrickson's theory, helping your students build up their bank account of positive emotions over time changes their brain to help them learn more effectively, form better relationships, and become more resilient. Next time you are planning a lesson, think about how you can use positive primers throughout the learning experience.

4. Using character strengths. Teaching strengths in schools has been shown to increase achievement and well-being. All students, especially trauma-affected students, need opportunities to identify, recognize, practice, and use their character strengths, which include qualities like kindness, humor, creativity, and bravery.

Ways to help students learn about their own strengths and the strengths of others include strengths surveys (if their literacy skills allow), strengths cards, and strengths spotting exercises-like identifying strengths in their heroes or playing a secret agent game where they are invited to "spy" on a fellow student to identify the strengths of that student. To teach about particular strengths, you could focus on stories in English and Humanities curriculums where characters or historical figures displayed those strengths. Strengths can also be developed through performing arts, sports, and other co-curricula.

5. Building resilience. Sadly, you cannot always impact the life of a student outside of school, but you can teach resilience strategies that help a student affected by trauma to gain a better understanding of their situation and to counteract the negative messages of shame they often internalize.

Students can practice resilience skills through role plays that help them to act out skills such as setting boundaries and verbalizing their feelings, all while in the safety of a classroom. Literature, poetry, and song lyrics can help students identify examples of resilient thinking-for example, Ariana Grande's song "No Tears Left to Cry" following the London terrorist attack at her concert. Analyzing the ways in which media figures, sports heroes, and other high-profile people explain their successes and failures showcases the difference between optimism and pessimism.

Teachers can also use moments in the learning process when students feel frustration or self-doubt to coach them on how to dispute their pessimism and automatic negative thinking ( "I can't do this"; "I'm dumb") to make room for optimism and constructive thinking ( "Maybe I'm tired and I need a break"; "I solved the problem last week and I can do it again"; "It takes me a little longer than others, but I've come a long way"). Learning resilience skills can provide an internal psychological buffer for students when they are outside of school, as well as providing empowering experiences at school.

Every teacher wants to positively impact the lives of their students. For students who are affected by trauma, the teacher plays an even more vital role. The introduction of positive psychology into the classroom has huge potential to change the trajectories of the lives of many of these young people by moving beyond repair to also inspire growth.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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Five Ways to Support Students Affected by Trauma

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Teachers can help students recognize their strengths and build resilience.

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- Difficulty sleeping
- Loss of appetite
- Toileting issues
- Inappropriate boundaries
- Tantrums

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Trauma & Children in Foster Care: A Comprehensive Overview - Concordia St. Paul

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Child abuse is a global epidemic, distressing millions of children across all countries and within all cultures (Hayes & O’Neil, 2018). Although there are child protective laws in place, child abuse continues to remain a major problem in the United States and other countries (Bell & Higgins, 2015).…

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https://www.nea.org/sites/default/files/2020-07/NEAPovertyTraumaHandbook.pdf

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- intentionally build relationships with students (ex. greet their students by name with a smiling face)
- model appropriate emotional responses
- listen beyond the surfact to how the studnts experiences his or her world in words, tone, and body language

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- act out with various behaviors, not conducive to learning
- withdraw and attempt to disappear in the classroom
- chronic absenteeism
- chronic health issues

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Situation: Death in the family/surviving a serious illness or accident

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Situation: Death in the family/surviving a serious illness or accident

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Helping Children with Grief, Loss and Trauma

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Situation: Abuse (by bullies or family members)

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Situation: Abuse (by bullies or family members)

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–demonstrate that you are a safe person to confide in and that you are available to listen and help

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-child displays signs of depression
-child is withdrawn
-child displays signs of fatigue and trouble concentrating

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–help them become aware of resources in their area to help them break the cycle of addiction, such as teen recovery groups
–practice healthy conflict resolution in the classroom by modeling it and helping students practice it by walking them through it; teach students how to name and regulate their emotions and feel them in a healthy way without acting on them destructively

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-child displays signs of substance abuse
-child displays signs of aggression and violence

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Situation: Substance abuse in the family

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Situation: Substance abuse in the family

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- Acknowledge the student daily
- Check in on them to see how they are feeling/or what they have been doing lately
- Let the student know that the teacher's door is always open to talk and that the classroom is a safe space
- Foster friendship in the classroom, have time for games to build bonds between students and the teacher
- Refer to school counselor if needed

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- Student has low self-esteem
- Student lashes out when angry
- Student seems sad or withdrawn
- Student is clingy

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Childhood Emotional Neglect: What It Is, and How It Can Affect You

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Childhood emotional neglect involves ignoring or not meeting the emotional needs of a child. Often neglectful parents were neglected children. Therapy can help.

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- Maintain class routine
- If class routine changes, prepare student in advance
- Meet with the parents to see how the teacher can support the student
- Refer to school counselor if needed

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- Student is frequently upset
- Doesn't follow instructions
- Student is withdrawn in class
- Student does not complete assignments
-Student not eating lunch
- Student cries during class

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Divorce and separation correlate positively with diminished school achievement and performance. Daniel Potter of the University of Virginia found that elementary school children who experience parental divorce immediately begin performing worse academically than their peers from intact families. This gap persists through elementary school.

Children exposed to unilateral divorce are less educated by adulthood. Children have lower educational aspirations and test scores during the process of their parents' marital disruption.

Children of divorced parents are also more likely to be held back a grade and have lower grade point averages (GPAs). High school students in intact families have GPAs 11 percent higher than those from divorced families, and children in intact married families have the highest combined English and math GPAs. One study (controlling for parental education, parental occupation, family size, etc.), found that children whose parents divorce get about seven-tenths of a year less education than children from intact families. Kindergarteners with divorced parents have an average math and reading score about three points lower than kindergarteners with nondivorced parents.

Children whose mothers divorced and remained divorced did worse over time on Peabody Individual Achievement Test reading recognition tests (which gauge children's ability to recognize and pronounce words) than children from intact married families. By age 13, there is an average difference of half a year in reading ability between children of divorced parents and children from intact families. On the CAT (Common Admissions Test) Math/Verbal Percentile Scores children from married, always-intact families scored in the 58th percentile, followed by children from married stepfamilies and divorced single-parent families (48th percentile).

In the Kent State University Impact of Divorce Project, which used a national sample study of 699 elementary students, children from divorced homes performed worse in reading, spelling, and math and repeated a grade more frequently than did children in intact two-parent families. The project's findings led the researchers to conclude that children and young adolescents suffered long-term negative effects following divorce. Teenagers who experience parental divorce score lower than their counterparts from intact families on math, science, and history tests.

Some studies show that the correlation between adolescent family disruption and educational attainment is weaker after controlling for the family's socioeconomic status. This finding likely reflects the influence of income on each. One of divorce's attendant problems is the financial instability it inflicts on those who experience it.

Lack of family transitions after divorce does not eliminate the effect of the divorce on student academic performance, but it does provide their performance in math and social studies a certain degree of protection, compared to students who live in unstable families with multiple family transitions.

Norwegian research found that children who experience divorce early in life are likely to have lower educational outcomes, finding that the effect of divorce on education is strongest when the child is young. An American study, by contrast, found that those who had experienced a late divorce (between grades six and 10) were more likely to get low grades than children who experienced an early divorce (between kindergarten and grade five).

Residential mobility accounts for 29 percent of the academic performance gap between children living in stepfamilies and children living with both biological parents. Moving tends to increase behavioral, emotional, and academic problems for adolescents. This happens more often for adolescents with divorced or separated parents, and can contribute to lower GPAs. Overall, the less instability of any sort in the child's life following divorce, the less the impact on the child.

According to the National Survey of Children's Health, children who live with both biological parents or two adoptive parents are only one third as likely to have ever repeated a grade in school as those who living with their mother only, with one biological parent and a stepparent, or in other family configurations, such as with their father only or with foster parents. (See Chart Below)

Based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a greater fraction of children from intact married families earn mostly A's in school. About 28 percent of students who grew up in an intact married family received mostly A's, followed by students from intact cohabiting families (21 percent), single divorced parent families (18 percent), married stepfamilies (15 percent), cohabiting stepfamilies (11 percent), and always single parent families (9 percent). (See Chart Below)

The intact biological family facilitates parental involvement in adolescent children's education. Adolescents in intact biological families reported that their parents participated more in school, that they discussed school more with their parents, and that they knew more of their friends' parents than those in single-parent families and stepfamilies. In divorced families, parental involvement cannot make up for the detriment to their children's education. Fathers in always-intact married families are more involved in their children's homework than are stepfathers.

One study found that children in pre-disrupted families (whose parents' relationship would later dissolve) exhibit more academic, psychological, behavioral, and drug-related problems than children whose families remained intact. First grade students born to married mothers are less likely to behave disruptively (i.e. disobey a teacher, be aggressive with other children) than those born to single or cohabiting mothers. Daniel Potter also found that the deleterious effect of divorce on children's psychosocial well-being is an important factor in poor math and reading scores.

Children and adolescents in intact married families are more likely to care about doing well in school, to do schoolwork without being forced, to do more than "just enough to get by," and to do their homework. Adolescents who live in blended families and stepfamilies are less positively engaged in school than are adolescents from intact biological families.

One study found that children whose parents divorced skipped nearly 60 percent more class periods than children from intact families. Girls appeared to be more affected than boys.

Children who experienced their parents' divorce or separation are less likely to complete high school. An Australian study found that children of divorced families are 26 percent more likely to drop out of secondary school than children raised in intact families, and found that remarriage did not alleviate the effects of divorce on children's educational attainment. Eighty-five percent of adolescents in intact biological families graduate from high school, compared to 67.2 percent in single-parent families, 65.4 percent in stepfamilies, and 51.9 percent who live with no parents.

Children whose parents or grandparents divorce tend to have fewer years of education.

Divorce and separation reduces children's likelihood of attending college. Furthermore, 33 percent of students who have already completed secondary school but who have experienced their parents' divorce graduate from college, compared to 40 percent among their peers from intact families. Over 57 percent of children who live in intact biological families enter college, compared to 32.5 percent of children in stepfamilies, 47.5 percent of children in single-parent families, and 31.8 percent of children who live in families without either parent present. However, it seems that parental divorce has a greater impact on likelihood to complete secondary school than college. Children from intact married families have the highest high school graduation rate, and are more likely to gain more education after graduating from high school than those from other family structures.

Youth living in married stepfamilies and cohabiting stepfamilies (i.e., with the mother's live-in boyfriend/partner) and single-parent families after a divorce or separation have lower college expectations than youth who have always lived in intact families. Sixty percent of mothers in intact married families expected their child to graduate college, compared to 40 percent of mothers in co-habiting stepfamilies and 36 percent of always-single mothers. Correspondingly, 69 percent of children from intact biological families applied to college, according to one study, compared to only 60 percent of students who were not from intact families. About 40 percent of sons and 44.7 percent of daughters from intact biological families aim to get more education after obtaining their undergraduate degree, compared to 30.7 percent of sons and 35.3 percent of daughters from single-parent families.

According to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 91 percent of individuals who grew up with married biological parents received a high school degree. They are followed by those who grew up in a married stepfamily (80 percent), those who grew up with a single, divorced parent (76 percent), those who grew up in a cohabiting stepfamily (68 percent), those who grew up with an always-single parent (63 percent), and those who grew up in an intact cohabiting family (60 percent). (See Chart Below)

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Effects of Divorce on Children's Education

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Divorce and separation correlate positively with diminished school achievement and performance. Daniel Potter of the University of Virginia found that elementary school children who experience parental divorce immediately begin performing worse academically than their peers from intact families. This gap persists through elementary school. Children exposed to unilateral divorce are less educated by adulthood.

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- Class could write cards to the deployed parent
- Class could send a care package to the deployed parent
- Teacher can set up a small patriotic display board, and post military pictures
- Student could give a presentation on their deployed parent and what they do in the military
- Refer student to school counselor if needed

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- Student is withdrawn in class and from friends
- Student is quiet and daydreaming in class
- Student is not completing assignments

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Situation: Parent is deployed overseas with the military for 1 year

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Situation: Parent is deployed overseas with the military for 1 year

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Trauma Faced by Children of Military Families: What Every Policymaker Should Know – NCCP

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Active duty military personnel and National Guard and reservists experience multiple deployments as a result of the conflicts that comprise the War on Terror. A large body of research has accumulated on the behavioral health problems faced by military personnel as a result of these conflicts. After…