Date: Monday, July 6, 2026
I’m Donna Burton, Assistant Research Professor within Child and Family Studies in the College of Behavioral and Community Sciences at USF in Tampa. My work is housed within the Child and Family Behavioral Health Division, focused on trauma-informed care (TI, TIC). I’ve been fortunate to lead evaluation efforts in partnership with organizations making strides toward adoption of child-centered trauma-informed practices.
The need for evidence-based TI practices (EBPs) is vast and strides have been made in developing practices with demonstrated effectiveness across settings and diverse populations of children and adolescents. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) emerged alongside this upsurge in approaches to TIC for children, as it became clear that having TI practices within a community-based toolkit was not enough. Created by Congress in 2000, the NCTSN increases access to services for children who experience or witness traumatic events. The network includes frontline providers/community-based organizations, family members, researchers/evaluators, and national partners committed to improving TI care. Importantly, this work is not only a bilateral exchange between providers and those who evaluate or research TI interventions. The third critical player is implementation science, a collection of approaches that promote integration of EBPs into real-world settings and bridge the gap between research and practice.
The NCTSN is a leader in translating scientific proof of effectiveness into treatment settings. In a seminal work by Lawrence Green (2008), the blueprint for practice-based evidence (PBE) is laid out through this critical question: Making research relevant: if it is an evidence-based practice, where’s the practice-based evidence? PBE rests on the notion that implementation of novel interventions requires a generative, bi-directional conversation in which research speaks to practice and practice speaks to research. Green exposes fallacies that have historically presumed a one-directional conceptualization wherein practice settings are merely repositories for evidence-based interventions.
I want to spotlight what I believe to be a crucial product of this bi-directional dialogue: our definition of childhood trauma. When I first learned about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a clinician, it was defined by experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event within one of three categories: abuse, combat, or natural disaster. Yet, practice settings have informed the expansion of what trauma means, particularly for children and families. Trauma can, of course, stem from child abuse in all its insidious forms, including emotional abuse and neglect. However, trauma may also be borne of witnessing violence; housing instability or homelessness; residing in a location that requires hypervigilance of danger; exposure to drug abuse in the home; and the list goes on.
Trauma can result from a single event, or from repeated exposure to events that challenge a child’s sense of safety. It can be complex, involving multiple and varied events. Trauma happens in the lives of adolescents and teens who can tell us what happened, and identify timeframes, locations, and perpetrators. Trauma can also happen to pre-verbal infants and toddlers who cannot provide these details, though they are no less traumatized. Trauma can be a devastating event that happened to an individual, or it can be generational as beliefs about unprocessed trauma and ineffective coping mechanisms are passed from one generation to the next.
As a clinical practitioner early in my career, I read “the literature” to better understand trauma and EBPs. Now, as an evaluator, I turn to community-based partners as co-creators in program evaluation plans, from development and design to data collection, analysis, and dissemination. I am learning from them about the expansion of our definition of trauma and the diverse needs of children and families as they cope in its wake.
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