Has your child ever shut down or seemed distant in particular situations, even you were trying to help? Or perhaps you’ve noticed them flinch or look away when stressed. These moments can, understandably, prove confusing to even the most attuned of caregivers, but your child’s body language may actively be telling you what their words cannot.
It’s an unfortunate reality that not all children grow up in loving, caring, and calm homes, and a majority of those in the child welfare system have a history of trauma. These experiences inform both a child’s brain development and how their nervous system responds to perceived threats throughout the rest of their life. Feelings such as a lack of safety, overwhelm, or shutdown may occur when trauma triggers arise, and it can often be difficult for children to put these feelings into words during or after episodes of chronic stress.
Fortunately, there are a myriad of body language cues, often subconscious in nature, that parents and caregivers can watch for to build a better understanding of their child’s inner world. In this week’s blog, we dive into the world of body language as a tool you can use to better notice, understand, and support your child.
Big picture: why body language matters after trauma
Research shows trauma changes how the nervous system and brain process emotional cues, and many clinicians now use frameworks such as Polyvagal Theory to explain why a child’s posture, facial tone, and responsiveness can rapidly shift between being shut down, hyper-alert, or socially engaged. These cues can often occur below conscious awareness, and nonverbal signaling can act as a window into internal states of safety versus threat. To complicate matters further, perceived threat triggers can vary widely amongst children. One child’s nervous system may not respond to a trigger that another child may find crippling. There is no ‘one size fits all’ way of understanding what may trigger stress responses within children, and each child’s unique lived experience must be taken into account.
As your child responds to stressors and attempts to self-regulate, here are some helpful body language cues (and their deeper meaning) that experts in child behavior and development have identified:
Tight, rigid posture or “coiled” movements
What to watch for: Hunched shoulders, jaw clenching, arms held close to the torso, stiffness or stillness of the body, sudden or jerky movements when motion occurs.
When a child’s nervous system enters a hyper arousal, defensive state, the autonomic nervous system primes the body against environmental threats. During this state, a child may display guarded movement or overly watchful monitoring, an attempt to prime the body to potentially fight or flee from perceived danger. Studies of children with traumatic lived experience often identify this sort of heightened motor reactivity, and these children often have a vastly different baseline background stress relative to peers.
Flattened or neutral facial expression
What to watch for: A blank face featuring little to no emotion, mismatch of facial expression during known stressors, low levels of emoting when verbalizing.
Spontaneous smiling, animated facial movement, and dynamic expressions are typical occurrences in children with relaxed nervous systems, so the absence of these features can often tell us something about a child’s interior world. For children with complex trauma and PTSD, research has unveiled a greater incidence of observable neutral facial expressions during interview sessions and interactions. This state often holds true even during very emotionally charged or difficult topics for the child, and we should view it through the lens of adaptation and protection. Dampening of emotions, disassociation, and conserving of emotional energy are all attempts by the brain and body to avoid re-triggering distress. These cues do not mean a child isn’t actively feeling acute emotional turbulence, however. A neutral exterior does not paint a reliable picture of the inner emotional turmoil a child may be experiencing.
Avoidant gaze, turning away, or reduced eye contact
What to watch for: Downward gaze, side glances, closing of the eyes, and physically turning the body away when a topic or person becomes challenging.
Avoidance of eye contact or orienting away is commonly linked with attempts to reduce nervous system arousal or avoid perceived harm, and children who have been harmed may interpret direct gazes as threatening or overwhelming. Turning away from a perceived threat can be a nonverbal way to self-protect, and studies show that a child’s nonverbal avoidance may also accompany a reluctance to disclose or discuss difficult memories.
Startle responses, rapid blinking, or hyper vigilant scanning
What to watch for: Exaggerated flinching to sudden sounds, rapid eye blinking, repeated scanning of the room, or very quick head turns.
These are all classic signs of a nervous system on high alert and perhaps one of the easiest body language cues on this list parents may observe in their child. Hypervigilance and exaggerated startle responses reflect a nervous system finely dialed to constantly be on alert for sensory cues. Children with lived trauma experience and PTSD have a higher baseline for perceiving potential threat, and because of this, may show these behaviors in increased volume as internal stress ramps up and internal regulation fails.
Body freezing and dissociative stillness
What to watch for: Going very quiet, staring into space, becoming unresponsive or slow to react, or seeming “checked out”.
Freezing or dissociative behavior can often be observed when attempts at fight or flee no longer feel possible to the child, and this behavior has appropriately been termed a ‘shutdown response’. Children in this shutdown response may not be physically capable of speaking or moving, and these observables are the body’s attempt to lower activity and protect from overwhelming distress. Lowered rates of blinking, eye movement, and lack of motion in the body are all possible cues of such shutdown, and children with developmental or complex trauma history may be prone to this shutdown response when discussing painful topics.
Parting thoughts:
The body language cues above are not exhaustive, and it is important to remember that each child and their lived experiences are unique. Reading your child’s body language cues can be a helpful starting point for times when verbalizing, understanding, or interpreting other context cues proves difficult, and it’s simply another tool to add to one’s parental toolbox. The patterns you observe over time are also one of the most important things to consider rather than just observations from a single experience. Pay attention to clusters of body language cues as they occur, and reflect on instances of your child’s acute stress after the fact to see what observables you noticed in aggregate.
We hope that these tips give you another tool in your journey as a parent or caregiver of foster, adoptive, or kinship children. If you are a parent looking for more support or resources, reach out to our team at 855-236-7857, or contact us on this website, and a member of our staff will connect with you.