Resilience to childhood trauma more complex than once thought, study shows 

The narrative that children are inherently resilient beings—that they can recover from tragedy or difficulties with ease and without consequence is flawed, new work from the University of Vermont (UVM) suggests. 

While most children do well in response to adversity, UVM’s Larner College of Medicine Professor William Copeland said that when children experience multiple traumas, the outcome is often different, and that they can recover from tragedy or difficulties with ease and without consequence.

Around 60 per cent of people will experience some form of trauma by 16 years of age, Professor Copeland explained, however when exposures to trauma are cumulative, the situation becomes more complex. 

As the principal investigator for the Great Smoky Mountains Study, which has tracked the mental and physical outcomes of a cohort of North Carolina residents since 1992, Professor Copeland and fellow researchers analysed data in the early 2000s, finding that 10 percent of children exposed to multiple traumas seemed to emerge unscathed. 

Running repeat analysis 20 years later, when participants in the study were aged in their 40s, a 2022 study uncovered a different story, with a significant portion of the children who had appeared resilient earlier in their life developing anxiety and depression as adults.

“Even though they looked like super-copers in childhood there was still a cost,” Professor Copeland said. “I wasn’t unhappy with shattering this notion of the resilient individual.”

Rather than taking this approach he believes we should adopt a public health lens, and try to reduce exposure to trauma, right from the start. 

Hundreds of papers have come from the Great Smoky Mountains Study as investigators routinely check in with participants with hefty questionnaires that screen for exposure to trauma and sample their blood for biomarkers of stress.

“Few studies do what this does and for as long,” the Professor explained. 

“The continuous asking the same questions over time is a really powerful design. It allows researchers to see effects of interventions or events in childhood that may not have been obvious at first.”

When asked for insights about which traumatic experiences from childhood tend to last Professor Copeland says that new clues are emerging. 

Decades of research have shown that one of the strongest predictors of a person’s health is socioeconomic status. Children living in poverty are more likely to be poor as adults and to develop physical and cognitive ailments. That is intergenerational poverty at work. New evidence from Professor Copeland’s team strengthens support for a policy that could break that cycle: cash transfers to parents. 

Simply put, it means giving people money to use as they see fit. The findings emerged after a natural experiment unfolded in 1996 when the Eastern Band of Cherokee opened a casino and began gifting enrolled members of the tribe about $5,000 annually, enabling researchers to examine what happens when parents are provided with a windfall of cash. In 2003, the team first demonstrated the benefit of direct cash transfers to parents.

“It can make a big difference being in poverty or not,” Professor Copeland explained.

The researchers found that for American Indian families bumped above the poverty line, there was improvement in the psychiatric symptoms of their children. A follow up study Copeland led in 2022 found that adults whose parents received financial support not only had lower levels of anxiety but were also more likely to report having better physical and financial health. 

Evidence for direct cash transfers was further strengthened last year in a study published in Nature, when Copeland’s team found these benefits persisted across generations. Researchers found the reading and math scores of third graders whose mothers received a decade of funds during childhood had the equivalent of half a year of additional learning over their peers who didn’t receive payments.

“I keep expecting the effects to dissipate but it hasn’t,” Professor Copeland said.

He argues the findings support policies such as a child tax credit similar to the one enacted in 2021, which gave some families up to $3,600 for each child under six years of age.

“I do think giving money to parents is a good thing,” the Professor added. “Parents make choices that are in the best interest of their kids.”

Over the years, the focus of the Great Smoky Mountain Study has shifted from examining the psychiatric health of rural youth to health across the participants’ lifespans. The participants were 9 to 13 years of age when first enrolled and many now have children of their own, and many of those children are now part of the study.

“I love puzzles,” Professor Copeland said. “I want to understand what makes a difference. … What keeps me up at night is I have been given this amazing dataset—what if we don’t squeeze out all that we could? There are only so many ways we can study humans. This is how we learn.”