ACE Scores: The Lifelong Effects of Traumatic Childhood Experiences
Heard of the ACE score? First popularised in the 1990s, ACEs (or, "Adverse Childhood Experiences") are traumatic events that usually occur between ages 0 - 17 that can have significant, long-lasting impacts on our health and wellbeing.
Sound ominous? Unfortunately, the reality is that a lot of young people who attend our schools, offices, and community sport groups could be affected by ACEs.
That said, in this blog post we’ll take a deep dive into what ACEs are, how they can affect lifelong health (and learning!) outcomes, and shed some light on how we can best support these students, patients, and other young people that we connect with in school, at work, and at home.
What are Adverse Childhood Experiences?
Adverse Childhood Experiences (commonly referred to as ACEs), are traumatic events that occur in our younger life–traditionally between the ages of 0-17.
A now popularised mental health assessment tool to help better contextualise a person’s younger life, an ACE Score is the total number of 1 through 10 possible Adverse Childhood Experiences a person experienced before the age of 18 that are shown to significantly increase the risk of lifelong health outcomes, wellbeing, socioeconomic disadvantages, and more.
Among the 10 ACEs included in the assessment are some of the most common signs of significant household dysfunction that may affect a child’s overall wellbeing including abuse, neglect, substance abuse, and incarceration of a caregiver.
A heavy but all-too-true reality for many families, the first-ever study into poor adult health outcomes in the 1990s produced the ACE scoring tool after noticing significant connections between 10 common traumatic childhood experiences and key health and socioeconomic adversity later in life.
What are the 10 Adverse Childhood Experiences?
- Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse
- Physical or emotional neglect
- Domestic violence or witnessing a mother-figure abused
- Divorce
- Mental illness, incarceration, or substance abuse of a caregiver in the home
The Domino Effect: ACE Impacts Later in Life
With such stressful events happening in and around the home, it’s easy to see how ACEs could affect the lives, learning abilities, and social-emotional outcomes of our students and kids. Unfortunately, the long-running effects of ACEs aren’t limited to the before-and-after of any traumatic event; studies show that ACEs have a link to our wellbeing later in life.
What are some of these trends?
- Mental health challenges including depression, anxiety, PTSD
- Cardiovascular disease, obesity, Type 2 diabetes
- Risk-taking behaviours including smoking and illicit drugs
- Substance abuse, and
- Increased risk for suicide
Needless to say–what happens in our younger years has direct connections with our opportunities to lead a flourishing, healthy life down the road.
The silver lining? By noticing, reporting, and moving to actively support young people who have experienced significant trauma we can interrupt the cycle and significantly reduce the likelihood of the above.
Supporting Students and Children Who Have Experienced Trauma
While we work to give every child the opportunity to have a safe and secure home, reality doesn’t always go as planned. Instead, teachers, psychologists, physicians, and other adults who work with kids have a fantastic opportunity to recognise the signs of a student or patient who may have experienced a significant event and action a support plan right away.
Call us biased, but we believe that educators seeing their students every day of the week is the most reliable ‘safe’ zones for young people from dysfunctional homes–and the classroom is a fantastic opportunity to impart mental health support strategies for all kids.
If you’re teaching, supporting, or working with a child who has faced adversity, you can:
- Report it: many adult figures who work with kids are mandatory reporters. If you’re in a position to report an event that affects a child’s safety or wellbeing, following protocol comes first.
- Enquire: in many ways kids are just like adults–but smaller. Treat any concern about a child’s wellbeing or awareness of an ACE event with the same sensitivity and respect you would an adult friend. Lean into curiosity and friendly conversation to enquire about the child’s current wellbeing.
- Routine: one of the things taken away from children who have experienced traumatic events is safety, stability, and knowing ‘what comes next’. If you’re teaching a student who has faced significant trauma, a ‘rinse-and-repeat’ routine will help ensure the student knows what to expect, what is expected of them, and encourage a level of mental and physical safety required for effective learning.
- Social-emotional skills: we appreciate the (relentless!) demands of running a primary school class. Instead of creating an alternative lesson plan for a singular student struggling with significant stress, consider introducing social-emotional learning into your class wide lesson plan.
By encouraging the child to develop a vocabulary to speak about their wellbeing and skills to help them manage the after-effects of trauma like anxiety and stress, both the student who has lived through an ACE event and their classmates can start learning practical mental health management skills.
Changing the Outcome of ACEs with Better Mental Health Education
Despite the heartbreaking reality of working with children who have experienced traumatic events, it's key to remember that we can’t change what has happened–but we can play a pivotal role in the next experiences a child has both now and down the road.
With the right support, professional development, and resources, adults who work with kids are in a fantastic position to help change the outcomes for kids who have experienced trauma.
Levelling the playing field for all young people, teachers can introduce social-emotional learning into their lesson plans to encourage all students to develop supportive mental health skills.
If you’re interested in better supporting and proactively teaching practical social-emotional skills, follow along with The Care Co blog. (And check out our K-6 software!) We’re regularly deep diving into kids’ mental health and how we can start making changes for all student’s wellbeing both now and in the future.
