© 2024
Virginia's Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Lawmakers Consider Public Awareness Campaign on Childhood Trauma

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
/
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

 

 

Virginia’s lawmakers are preparing for another busy legislative year. One topic on the agenda: how to better serve children who face violence or trauma at home.

  Neglect, abuse, housing instability -- experts agree trauma as a child, affects health as an adult.  Virginia’s Secretary of Health Bill Hazel says the question for the state is whether we put resources in the right place.

“I’ve got this crazy theory that it’s easier to raise healthy kids than it is to fix broken adults,” said Hazel to members of Virginia’s Commission on Youth Wednesday. “And when we look at the money that we’re spending in the Medicaid program and other’s behavioral health. We spend a lot of time fixing broken adults.”

Hazel was presenting legislative recommendations from the Governor’s Children’s Cabinet on how to start shifting resources to something called “trauma informed care.”

By way of explanation, Hazel used an example.

“How many times have you wanted to shake a kid and say ‘What’s wrong with you?’ When the real question is ‘What made you this way?’” he said.

Lawmakers are being asked to invest in a workgroup, establish a grant program, and get things rolling on a public awareness campaign.

State Senator Barbara Favola, a Democrat from Northern Virginia who chairs the Commission on Youth, suggested another solution with a much heftier price tag: provide more psychologists and social workers in schools.

 
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association