Rachel Gillen's Blog

When I think of child development, I think of how important a healthy environment and influences are on a child's overall development. To ensure that a child develops normally, we need to avoid things like neglect, abuse, trauma (consistent and pervasive) to allow a child to avoid affects later on in life. As I work with children every day who have experienced trauma, abuse, or neglect and I have also worked with children who have had atypical experiences growing up, I can compare and contrast. This is a video we show all staff at my agency as it gives a clear pictures of the affects of early childhood trauma on adults.

This has always been a challenging topic for me as I come from a family who are all public school teachers. Over the past decade, we have seen a huge increase in testing and pressure on teachers to have all their children be successful in testing. I am a result of testing as I started testing in 3rd grade and had to do it every year after that. One of the main reasons I picked early childhood was the lack of standardized testing required by the government. The program I come from assess' children on where they are developmentally but not on intelligence. I think the only testing children should ever have to go through is purely tests to see how a child learns best. Our education systems needs to move to meeting children where they are in the world of learning. We wonder why a child is struggling in school, I am a big believer in it's not a disability or a lack of motivation, it's the fact that we aren't teaching to them with the method that they learn from best. I thi...

On a daily basis, I work with children who have experienced trauma, abuse, neglect, etc. in their early childhood years. Due to their experiences in their early years, we see a wide range of behavioral challenges for all of our children including assaultive behavior towards adults, enuresis, hoarding of food, social challenges, and many other behavioral challenges. All of their challenges early on have led to developmental challenges later on. The majority of our children, although 5-13 years old in actual age, present more like a 3-5-year-old developmentally as their experiences have affected their overall brain development. All of their behaviors are learned behavior, they have developed and learned these behaviors as a way to cope with the trauma/stress they have dealt with. They are living with us so we can work to change that behavior, help them learn a new behavior so they can continue to learn and develop through life. Depending on the type of trauma they have ...

I looked at immunizations at a public health concern. In the state of Colorado, all child care facilities are now required to report immunization records of all their children enrolled. Due to this change, the program I oversaw decided to require all children be fully immunized when attending our school. We chose to only accept medical exemptions not personal exemptions. We did this for one main reason, the safety of all of our children. Not only were we focusing on our children in the preschool but also our children who lived on campus in our residential treatment program. When evaluating different public health concerns, this topic seemed most important to me because it was a topic I dealt with quite a bit the past two years. I live in a community where quite a few families chose not to immunize their child. When families came to tour our facility, it was always nerve wracking to see how families felt regarding immunizations. Some understood completely while oth...