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Abstract

While it should be obvious on moral grounds that abusing children in any shape or form is wrong, biological, medical and economic arguments have been necessary to bring attention to the long-standing impact of early childhood trauma. In particular, stemming from the mental health field, a trauma-informed approach seems to have become a privileged way to understand and attend to children exposed to an array of traumatic experiences. However, the introduction of such an approach is relatively recent and its implementation still needs to be explored. In this article, the authors describe some of the possible contributions and limitations of a trauma-informed approach to early childhood educators’ practice. They highlight the risks involved in privileging children’s socialization to the detriment of their subjectification and underscore the need to broaden dominant approaches to early childhood trauma by assuming an ethical responsibility towards children. To guide educators in the necessary endeavour of encountering each child as an infinite Other, the authors found inspiration in the work of Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

Keywords

Children’s mental health early childhood education Levinas trauma-informed

Introduction

The recent immigration crisis at the US border has heightened public awareness of the long-lasting traumatic effects of family separations. Paediatricians have spoken out in public media against such separations, often highlighting the repercussions of early childhood trauma. For example, Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was quoted in The Atlantic about the effects of stress hormones on the brain development of the young child (Khazan, 2018), and the Associated Press published a summary of scientific research findings on the same topic of toxic stress and infant brain development (Tanner, 2018).

While the recent family separations are an egregious example of early childhood trauma, such trauma is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Indeed, children aged ‘birth to 5 years have disproportionately high rates of maltreatment’ (Osofsky and Lieberman, 2011: 120), with inflicted and accidental injuries and exposure to interpersonal violence being the most frequent forms of trauma. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study (Felitti et al., 1998) evidenced trauma’s pervasiveness and contributed to a growing awareness of the incidence and effects of traumatizing experiences during a child’s early years. Early experiences of war, sexual and physical abuse, domestic violence, forced separation from family and other types of trauma can affect a child’s development well into adulthood (Shonkoff et al., 2012).

In response to early childhood trauma, trauma-informed approaches have been developed (Hodas, 2006). Such approaches provide early childhood carers and educators with the awareness that some behaviours, such as social withdrawal, anger or hypersociality, can be expressions of early childhood trauma that call for opportunities to heal rather than behavioural correction.

There are, however, possible limitations to trauma-informed approaches to care. A focus on socializing children risks standardizing and pathologizing emotions rather than encouraging their expression. Despite almost 50 years of early interventions yielding rather modest results (Duncan and Magnuson, 2013; Farran, 1990, 2000; Tanner et al., 2015; Wastell and White, 2017), brain sciences are renewing the interventionist urge. When driven solely by economic interests, such interventions seem to conceive children as an ‘investment’ in the future workforce (Knudsen et al., 2006) rather than addressing in broader and more sustainable ways issues of poverty, racism and discrimination, which are often at the onset of trauma.

Much as we appreciate the attention that trauma-informed care approaches have brought to early childhood trauma, its pervasiveness and its potentially lifelong implications, we are concerned that if care is informed too strongly by trauma, this ‘information’ can overshadow receptiveness to the singularity of the child. In this article, we begin by outlining the principles of a trauma-informed approach to care. Following a description of some of its possible limitations, we propose the work of Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to guide an approach in which the ‘traumatized child’ is received first and foremost as an individual child and never only as an example or case of the category ‘early childhood trauma’. We highlight the need to articulate a broader response to early childhood trauma – one which foregrounds ethical principles and supports educators in distinguishing the technical aspects of a trauma-informed approach from the lived experience of embodying it. In doing so, we encourage educators to go beyond the occurrence of trauma, and the prescriptions to manage it, to instead embrace the responsibility of encountering and responding to the child as an unbounded individual.

The development of trauma-informed approaches to care

Considered landmark epidemiological research, the ACEs Study seems to have been the tipping point that finally succeeded in attracting public and political attention to address the issue of early childhood trauma. Based at Kaiser Permanente’s San Diego Health Appraisal Clinic, Felitti et al. (1998: 245) defined ACEs as ‘psychological, physical, or sexual abuse; violence against the mother; or living with household members who were substance abusers, mentally ill or suicidal, or ever imprisoned’. Using the survey responses of 17,337 patients, they explored the presence of ACEs in the household environment and assessed their long-term impact on adults’ health outcomes. They discovered that ACEs are pervasive. Almost 64% of the study’s participants reported having experienced at least one ACE, and more than one in five had experienced three or more. The cumulative effect of ACEs was found to be especially serious. For instance, participants with four or more ACEs compared to those with none

had 4- to 12-fold increased health risks for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt … a graded relationship [was also found] to the presence of adult diseases including ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures and liver disease. (Felitti et al., 1998: 245)

The ACEs Study also demonstrated that early adversity cuts across socio-economic variables. Critically, it linked the occurrence of early childhood trauma with rising health costs, leading children’s advocates to contend that early childhood trauma represents ‘a public health problem’ (Schilling and Christian, 2014: 309; Walker et al., 1992) and a ‘hidden epidemic’ (Lanius et al., 2010) which requires an urgent response. Indeed, some scholars argue that ‘the cumulative burden of multiple risk factors early in life may limit the effectiveness of later interventions’ (Shonkoff et al., 2009: 2255), so intervening early has been hailed as the most cost-effective investment of all (Heckman, 2008).

In order to implement such interventions, the idea of ‘trauma-informed’ care, stemming from the mental health field, proposes that the different service providers (e.g. nurses, paediatricians, therapists, social workers, educators, judges and policymakers) working with children who might have experienced trauma offer care explicitly shaped by the awareness of trauma, and act in a coordinated manner. Among these professionals, childcare providers and early childhood educators represent ‘a significant point of entry for intervention’ (Lieberman et al., 2011: 407) because they have extensive opportunities to observe and identify trauma symptoms and support referrals (Chu and Lieberman, 2010). Their participation is also considered critical because, in contrast with the significant gap between the need and provision of mental health services worldwide (World Health Organization, 2013) and the limited time that a therapy session usually lasts, educators have daily opportunities to support children’s emotional rehabilitation, and thus can enhance their mental health in consistent and powerful ways.

Considering that the origin of trauma and its remediation are typically related and dependent on relationships (Ludy-Dobson and Perry, 2010), a trauma-informed approach foregrounds the importance of providing children with dependable and nurturing care, in environments that are physically and emotionally safe and offer predictable routines (Sciaraffa et al., 2018). Creating such environments implies a schoolwide change away from coercive behavioural methods that focus on obedience and control, punish children, and tend to interpret so-called ‘challenging’ or ‘disruptive’ behaviours as attention-seeking, manipulative or goal-oriented (Phifer and Hull, 2016). It involves the implementation of routine screenings to identify trauma’s behavioural and affective manifestations, and a strong focus on developing and supporting children’s self-regulation and coping skills (Milot et al., 2015).

Educators trained to be trauma-informed strive to be ‘emotionally attuned’ (Dalli and White, 2015: 41) with children to validate their emotions and experiences. They know that some behaviours and strategies appear to be maladaptive when taken out of the context where they helped children survive (Hodas, 2006), and recognize that these are often the re-enactment or representation of something that the child cannot articulate or express verbally (Gaensbauer, 2004). Although such re-enactment usually takes the form of an outburst, trauma might also be expressed with, for instance, numbness, withdrawal or compliance (Cook et al., 2005). Thus, trauma-informed educators become keen observers of the child to identify trauma triggers and avoid retraumatization. They are aware of past or ongoing occurrence of trauma, so, when faced with a child who might be ‘acting out’, instead of asking ‘What is wrong with you?’ they approach the child with curiosity and the willingness to know what experience shapes their behaviour (Lieberman, 2015). Considering that caring for children exposed to trauma is often stressful or triggering, educators are encouraged to engage in self-care and reflective and ‘mindfulness’ practices to have better coping skills and preserve their own mental health (Dym Bartlett et al., 2017: 12).

Limitations and critiques of trauma-informed approaches to care

The proposal of a trauma-informed approach to care acknowledges that emotions belong in educational contexts and suggests that schools can function as a ‘safe haven’ for emotional expression and healing. A quick review of the basic tenets of trauma-informed approaches to care shows, however, that the main focus seems to be on regulating and controlling emotions rather than exploring and expressing them (see also Ritchie, 2016: 119–120). In fact, a main concern is how ‘negative’ emotions interfere with cognitive development, behavioural expectations and academic achievement, so trauma-informed approaches typically seek to yield children who are better at self-regulating, less prone to react impulsively, and have strategies to cope with adversity. In that sense, the role of early childhood education in relation to early childhood trauma seems aligned with ‘the plethora of evidence that supports quality child care as significant in promoting the socioemotional wellbeing of infants and toddlers’ (Mortensen and Barnett, 2016: 74). Accordingly, the main focus is on normalizing and standardizing emotions and behaviours – in other words, on socializing children.

While socialization is a legitimate function of early childhood centres and other educational institutions, we argue that it ought not to be the only function. As Biesta (2009) explains, ‘education’ – which he uses here in the sense of ‘schools and other educational institutions’ – ‘generally performs three different (but related…) functions,’ which he calls ‘the qualification, socialisation and subjectification function of education’ (39). The qualification function refers to the role education plays in preparing people to do particular kinds of things, including work, but also, for example, pursuing further education. The socialization function refers to the role education plays in preparing people to be ‘part of particular social, cultural and political “orders”’ (40). People are socialized into a host of conventions that keep society running smoothly, including everything from gender conventions to knowing that red means ‘stop’ and green means ‘go’ at the crosswalk. Qualification and socialization are fairly straightforward functions, and most people have a sense of what it means to say that a person is qualified or not qualified to do something, or to say that a child is or is not well socialized. Subjectification, however, is less straightforward. Biesta writes:

The subjectification function might perhaps best be understood as the opposite of the socialization function. It is precisely not about the insertion of ‘newcomers’ into existing orders, but about ways of being that hint at independence from such orders; ways of being in which the individual is not simply a ‘specimen’ of a more encompassing order. (40)

In other words, schooling fulfils a subjectification function if it enables students to ‘come into the world’ as unique persons (Biesta, 2006: 100). Different kinds of schooling will place a different emphasis on these three functions; it is uncontroversial, for example, to say that medical education should place a greater emphasis on qualifications than early childhood education. However, as Ruitenberg (2016: 14) argues, ‘schooling’ – in which we include institutionalized early childhood education – ‘must perform a subjectification function to claim it is educating at all and not only training or socializing’. This means that, if early childhood education becomes so focused on socialization – including through the regulation and normalization of emotions and behaviours – that it leaves little room for subjectification, it can no longer call itself early childhood ‘education’. Moreover, in contexts with histories of colonization, the emphasis on socialization entails the risk of ‘perpetuating the ongoing trauma of historical colonization’ (Ritchie, 2016: 114) by seeking to insert newcomers into a social order shaped by the dominant settler society, and misrecognizing ‘the harms of colonialism [through] the frame of trauma’ (Clark, 2016: 6). As Ritchie (2016: 114) describes in the context of the education of Māori children in New Zealand, ‘Western behaviourist programmes such as the “Incredible Years” [a US-developed programme for parents and teachers of children aged three to eight] focus on modifying children’s conduct, rather than modelling sensitive, respectful, compassionate, empathic relationality’.

Notwithstanding the importance of supporting children’s cognitive development, a focus on universalizing and controlling emotions rather than on supporting their expression and attending to the structural causes of trauma supports the ‘farsightedness’ of the western paradigm which conceives the child as ‘not-yet-an-adult’ rather than as ‘already-a-child’. Inscribed within this perspective, by projecting the ‘damaged’ child into the future, a trauma-informed approach risks overlooking the ‘present child’. It might easily dismiss the unique ways in which a child acts and responds within and beyond trauma, the coping strategies that a child intelligently develops, and the different ways in which a child asserts themself and acts in the world if we make the space for them to do so. We argue that, if a trauma-informed approach remains focused on children’s brains rather than minds (Burman, 2017), unconcerned with the actual child and occupied with their future performance as an adult, it risks missing out on meeting the budding subject who, as an Other, is facing us in the here and now within and beyond the occurrence of trauma. In other words, as Marlowe (2010) points out, an exclusive trauma-focused understanding often results in conflating with trauma the whole identity of those affected by it, thus eclipsing critical aspects and manifestations of the self. In this sense, a trauma-informed approach to care risks inscribing children, parents and mothers in particular within a deficit framework that furthers their classification, normalization and surveillance. Likewise, by using labels like ‘traumatized’ or ‘dysfunctional’, and conceiving children as ‘broken’ or ‘damaged’, trauma-informed approaches risk imposing further harm by pathologizing children and their families.

The economic focus on early childhood trauma

Based on the economic arguments first advanced by Heckman and Carneiro (2003; see also Cunha et al., 2010; Heckman, 2006), early interventions have come to be considered the most cost-effective investment of all. Recently, however, ‘the earlier the better’ principle has been debunked regarding parenting interventions (Gardner et al., 2019), adding to the existing criticisms of the dominance of economic interests (Burman, 2017; Howard-Jones, 2014; Vandenbroeck et al., 2017). About Heckman’s work, Wastell and White (2017) argue that despite its ‘mathematical sophistication’ (134), it has significant explanatory limitations and provides a ‘reductionist’ and ‘impoverished account of the world’ (137) that does not effectively support or recognize the broader needs of marginalized families (see also Howard-Jones, 2014).

Further underpinning the economic argument, the engagement and fascination with neuroscience and epigenetics has been remarkable. For instance, echoing the ‘infant determinist paradigm’ (Kagan, 1998) and resultant interventionist discourses, Van den Heuvel and Thomason (2016: 934) claim that, using foetal functional magnetic resonance imaging scans, they can predict behavioural and emotional issues prenatally with ‘huge implications for the burden on families and cost for society’. As Wastell and White (2017: 37) detail, this drive to find correlations between behaviours, psychological processes and the functioning of the brain is not new. The latest metaphor coined to that end – that of the brain working as an ‘information processing machine’ – was likely inspired by the computer and the brain’s internal structure and its ‘network’ appearance. Its acceptance has been fuelled by the ‘seductive allure of neuroscience explanations’ (Im et al., 2017: 518) and colourful brain images that claim to depict mind–brain relationships. This allure easily leads us to forget that the distinct biographies of each individual and ‘the sheer complexity of the brain, with billions of neurones and uncountable connections, [makes] the characterisation of its “state” at any time a formidable, if not an insuperable, computational challenge’ (Wastell and White, 2017: 39).

Disregarding these explanatory limitations, neuroscience and epigenetics are being used to intervene in families’ rearing practices and to politicize parenting (Macvarish et al., 2014: 795). They are politically useful because they are appealing to the public, do not appear to be moralizing and serve to divert attention from ‘the absence of consensus about what is right and wrong in family life’ (Macvarish et al., 2014: 796; see also Kagan, 1998). Underpinned by neuroscience, political arguments are presented as being neutral, objective and compassionate (for a critique of such governmental intrusion from the Foucauldian perspective of biopower, see Wells (2011)). Gillies (2013: 6) argues, however, that brain-based interventions are not only ‘deeply moralizing’; their presumed neutrality deflects attention away ‘from broader structural and economic risks facing families’. In other words, more often than not, ‘what might be seen as a brain disease may, in fact, be better described as diseases of poverty, racism, or other forms of marginalization’ (Sparks and Duncan, 2004: 34).

Conceiving mental health primarily as a biological and brain-related issue often results in the pathologization of ‘undesirable’ emotions and the ‘medicalization of social suffering’ (Maxwell, 2014). An alarming consequence of this has been the attempt to manage children’s affective and behavioural manifestations with a plethora of psychotropic medications (Sparks and Duncan, 2004), despite ‘the limited knowledge base that underlies psychotropic medication use in very young children’ (Zito et al., 2000: 1028; see also Anderson and Phelps, 2009).

Further evidencing the possible limitations of a medicalized and interventionist approach to trauma is the issue of diagnosis. Commenting on the classification of mental health and developmental disorders of infancy and early childhood proposed by the US organization Zero to Three (DC: 0-5), Von Klitzing (2017) notes the controversy that still exists over the appropriateness of categorizing infants’ mental health problems using psychiatric diagnoses. While highlighting that ‘infants do contribute actively to relationships and are not merely passive “victims” of detrimental environments’, Von Klitzing points out a significant fact. Taking the example of ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (starting from age 36 months) and Overactivity Disorder of Toddlerhood (age 24 to 36 months)’, both included in DC:0–5, he notes that ‘[a]ll the behavioral phenomena described as diagnostic criteria are related to social and cultural expectations’ (our emphasis) and states:

Put bluntly, the fact that the prevalence rate of the disorder has increased to 6% in school children does not tell us whether this is due to an increase in disordered children, or whether clinicians have become more alert to the symptoms, or whether social norms have changed over time with less tolerance towards children’s needs for movement and impulse expression.

As early childhood educators become knowledgeable about early childhood trauma, they will likely be more alert to the symptoms associated with it. It is still unclear, however, to what extent this knowledge will bias or enrich their understanding of each child. By exploring some of the possible limitations of trauma-informed approaches to early childhood education, we do not want to dismiss the foundational character of early childhood, and even less so minimize the consequences of early childhood trauma. Rather, we seek to contribute to children’s mental health and well-being by broadening the dominant approaches that seek to address it, particularly by highlighting the need to assume an ethical responsibility towards each child as a unique individual.

The legitimate concerns with which we opened this article, about the effects of stress hormones on the developing brain, flow from research in neuroscience and epigenetics. Our concern, then, is not whether neuroscience or epigenetics can contribute to our collective knowledge about the developing brain, as it is quite clear that they can; our concern is with too singular a focus on the brain and the reduction of the child as a whole person – an Other, as we discuss later – to the brain and its biological development. Indeed, following the English neuroscientist Steven Rose (2011: 69), we argue that such ‘increased knowledge [cannot] replace or diminish the insights into what it is to be human that come from philosophy, the social sciences or the humanities’.

Levinasian ethics in early childhood care and education

Our work builds on that of others who have drawn inspiration from Levinas’s ethics for a consideration of adults’ responsibility to young children. One of Levinas’s central contributions to philosophy has been a critique of the centrality of epistemology in philosophy and a foregrounding of ethics that does not rely on knowledge. A dominant assumption, especially in western ethics, has been that our ability to respond ethically to another person depends on us knowing enough about that person: what they need, what they have done, what their intentions were, and so forth. This assumption goes back to Descartes’s search for the one thing he could be certain about, from which he thought experience could begin. Descartes sought this certainty in knowledge or, more specifically, in the only thing he could know with certainty – namely, that he was the knowing subject (cogito). Levinas critiques this focus on certainty in knowledge and puts in its stead an ethical receptivity to the Other – a susceptibility to the vulnerability and suffering of another person, about whom we may not know anything.² He writes:

The I in the negativity manifested by [Cartesian] doubt breaks with participation but does not find in the cogito itself a stopping place. It is not I, it is the other that can say yes. From him comes affirmation; he is at the commencement of experience. (Levinas, 1969: 93)

Levinas rejects not only Descartes’s scepticism and rationalism, but also his focus on the self; it is not the self who initiates experience, but the Other. Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ is replaced by ‘The Other calls me, therefore I am’. More specifically, it is the face of the Other that calls me and in which the vulnerability of the Other reveals itself: ‘The face is the evidence that makes evidence possible – like the divine veracity that sustains Cartesian rationalism’ (204).

The idea of the ‘face’ in Levinas’s work is not self-evident, as it refers not literally to a person’s face but rather to the surface of the Other that presents and expresses itself to me. Levinas explains:

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me. (50–51; original emphasis)

The way in which the Other presents himself is unique and cannot be categorized according to the ‘set of qualities forming an image’. In other words, the Other presents herself to me not as a face with a button nose and freckles, or as a face with scars, or as a face that reminds me of my Aunt Minnie; no, it presents itself, full stop. ‘The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed’ (194).

Apprehending the face of the Other does not mean assessing a person’s specific needs or vulnerabilities so that I can then decide what a reasonable response would be to meet those needs or mitigate those vulnerabilities. Rather, it means being compelled to respond before knowledge about the person has been gathered. Receiving and apprehending the vulnerability of the Other means being compelled to respond to it.

Inspired by his Judaism, Levinas sees the encounter with another person as a mitzvah or call to which we must respond. The needs of the Other, for Levinas, must take priority over my own:

The Other does not only appear in his face, as a phenomenon subject to the action and domination of a freedom; infinitely distant from the very relation he enters, he presents himself there from the first as an absolute … the face summons me to my obligations and judges me … my position as I consists in being able to respond to this essential destitution of the Other, finding resources for myself. The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated. (215)

Some Levinasian scholars discuss the figure of the infant as the paradigmatic figure of the vulnerable Other to whose call we ought to respond. The mother’s surrender to the needs of her child becomes the model for any human being’s moral surrender to the needs of the vulnerable Other. For example, Strhan refers to the infant to explain the idea that the Other has ‘mastery’ over the self:

The mastery of the Other stems not from a relation of institutional power, but in a sense from his very vulnerability: that vulnerability gives his interpellation an urgency that undoes my self-sufficiency and places his need before my own. This could be illustrated in the way an infant might be seen to have ‘mastery’ over its mother. The mother will put the infant’s needs before her own, where mastery resides in the power of this vulnerability’s appeal. The Other is not a specific person, but their mastery resides in the appeal of the face that, as in this illustration, assumes an authority in vulnerability as potent as that of an infant. (Strhan, 2012: 39)

Similarly, Katz describes how the mother’s relation to the infant – not a particular mother to a particular infant but the figure of the mother to the figure of the infant – is exemplary for the responsibility of the self to the Other:

In order to illustrate the ethical relationship he has in mind, Levinas turns to the maternal figure. In his view, the maternal exemplifies that which is held hostage ethically by the other and which gives itself over to the other completely. (Katz, 2003: 133; see also Astell, 2004)

Like with the concept of ‘mastery’ in Strhan’s account, Katz’s reference to the concept of ‘hostage’ illustrates the inversion of the typical power relationship between adult and child: while the adult is, of course, physically, socially and politically more powerful than the child, Levinas’s perspective assigns to the child (and to the Other more generally) the ethical power to issue a call to which the adult (the moral self) must respond.

The most influential authors to have discussed the work of Levinas in relation to early childhood education and care are Dahlberg and Moss (2005). While the connections between Levinas’s ethics and care ethics are perhaps less straightforward than what Dahlberg and Moss make them out to be (e.g. see Diedrich et al., 2006), they offer a good insight into the way in which Levinas’s ethical perspective resists the common tendency in early childhood policies and practices to solve determined problems and work towards predetermined developmental and educational outcomes. Seen through the lens of Levinas’s ethics, they write: ‘the child becomes a complete stranger, not a known quantity through classificatory systems and normative practices whose progress and development must be steered to familiar and known ends’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005: 93). In the context of our discussion in this article, this means that the child who has experienced early childhood trauma can – the seriousness of trauma notwithstanding – still be encountered as a stranger. The child is never to be regarded only as a ‘traumatized child’, a child perennially identified through the known and knowable category of ‘trauma’, but always also as an unknowable Other. For Levinas (1969), the categories with which we comprehend and classify the Other are part of the institutional realm that imposes universal criteria and disregards uniqueness. He writes:

In the measure that the face of the Other relates us with the third party, the metaphysical relation of the I with the Other moves into the form of a We, aspires to a State, institutions, laws, which are the source of universality. But politics left to itself … deforms the I and the other who have given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal rules, and thus as in absentia. (Levinas, 1969: 300)

The challenge is that Levinas’s ethics demands not a response that can be easily added to the more common educational and therapeutic models that rely on knowledge about the child. Rather, Levinas’s ethics demands an interruption and suspension of such models; the adult is stripped of labelled professional duties such as ‘care’ and ‘education’ and becomes a site of passivity and susceptibility to the alterity and vulnerability of the child. This stance honours the subjectification function of education that we discussed earlier: an early childhood educator who can receive and be susceptible to the child also assumes and witnesses the child’s subjectivity. As Biesta (2009) explains, in the socialization and qualification functions, the adult imposes systems and structures on the child; subjectification happens when the child can exceed those systems and structures, and comes into the world as a unique being.

Working with Levinas’s perspective to provide a critical response to Australian early childhood education policy, Cheeseman et al. write:

We examine closely how the systemisation of education for infants might be based on a particular ‘knowing’ of the infant and how this ‘knowing’ might define the experiences of infants as they increasingly encounter written representations of learning in the form of government produced curricula. (Cheeseman et al., 2015: 823)

Cheeseman et al. do not address specific policies or curricula for children who have experienced early childhood trauma, but we would frame our concern about such policies and curricula in terms similar to theirs: trauma-informed care approaches tend to be based on a particular ‘knowing’ of the infant and insist on the need to train educators about early childhood trauma. They thus entail the risk that the unique otherness of the particular infant is subsumed in categories of knowledge, and that the unsatisfiable responsibility to the Other is misunderstood as a satisfiable responsibility to meet identified needs and diagnoses.

The French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricœur captures the demand on early childhood carers and educators particularly well when he describes the situation of a person entrusted with the responsibility for a fragile other:¹

We are rendered responsible by the fragile. Yet what does ‘rendered responsible’ mean? When the fragile is not something but someone – an individual, groups, communities, even humanity – this someone appears to us as entrusted to our care, placed in our custody. Let us be careful, however. The image of custody, or the burden which one takes upon oneself, should not render us inattentive to the other component emphasized by the expression ‘entrusted to our care’ – the fragile as ' ‘someone’ who relies on us, expects our assistance and care, and trusts that we shall fulfil our obligations. (Ricœur, 1995: 16; our emphasis)

The phrase ‘rendered responsible’ describes powerfully how the encounter with the child positions the early childhood educator as the one responsible for the fragile Other. While the early childhood educator can benefit from reading the case notes about the child or studying research on early childhood trauma, neither the case notes nor the research on early childhood trauma can render the early childhood educator responsible. It is only in meeting the child as a person that the early childhood educator can, as Ricœur puts it, ‘feel that we are rendered responsible for, and by, someone’ (16; original emphasis).

Conclusion

We have emphasized the idea that the fragile Other is ‘someone’ – a person to whom we are responsible. In other words, we are responsible not to a what but to a whom, not for something about the Other but to the Other as a whole, singular and ultimately unknowable person. The biological and clinical knowledge we have gained about early childhood trauma has served to confirm and recognize that young children not only do remember traumatic experiences but can be profoundly affected by them. Early childhood trauma has neurobiological, cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural consequences that can potentially reverberate throughout the lifespan of the individual. Insofar as this knowledge is fuelling the development of political, social and therapeutic actions to support the mental health and well-being of young children, we are undoubtedly moving forward in curtailing the consequences of early childhood trauma.

We have argued, however, for the need to bring ethical considerations to the fore to reposition the child within the trauma-informed approach not solely as a victim but first and foremost as a whole Other. Our concern is that the powerful knowledge that continues to develop around early childhood trauma risks overpowering the encounter with the uniqueness of each child. We have also noted that, by focusing on intervening early at the level of children and families, systemic inequalities are individualized and continue to be insufficiently addressed. This tendency follows the logic of an economistic ‘investment’ discourse that focuses on the child as a potential future adult rather than as a person in the here and now. Rather than developing interventions focused on managing and ‘normalizing’ children’s ‘undesirable’ emotions, the historical and current violence and trauma that young children continue to experience worldwide compel us to revise the predominance of the rational over the emotional, and highlight the need to engage with children’s emotions as well as with ours. The early childhood educator faced with a child who has experienced early childhood trauma may well be capable of and responsible for repairing and redressing some of the damage the trauma has done but, ultimately, the greatest demand is that of being responsible to the child as a singular person.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Áurea M Vericat Rocha is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, and a Montessori early childhood educator. She works in collaboration with Indigenous early childhood educators to inform the development of Indigenous early childhood professional development education, particularly around early childhood trauma.

Claudia W Ruitenberg is professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is author of Unlocking the World: Education in an Ethic of Hospitality (2015), co-editor of Education, Culture and Epistemological Diversity: Mapping a Disputed Terrain (2012), and editor of (i.a.) Reconceptualizing Study in Educational Discourse and Practice (2017).

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Trauma-informed practices in early childhood education: Contributions,limitations and ethical considerations

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The development of trauma-informed approaches to care

Limitations and critiques of trauma-informed approaches to care

The economic focus on early childhood trauma

Levinasian ethics in early childhood care and education

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

Notes

Author biographies

References