Childhood acquired brain injury

Prevalence and impacts

The prevalence of ABI amongst school-aged children in the UK is estimated to be in the region of 1 in 30, based on admissions to A & E, although some professionals consider it to be much higher, as a child can be admitted to A & E with another more urgent injury, which is considered to be of overriding concern at the time.

It can be tempting to assume that an injury acquired in childhood is likely to have a more positive long term outcome than one acquired during adulthood. It could be assumed that a child or adolescent could have a better chance of developing compensatory strategies whilst still at the stage where significant development and learning is taking place. If the injury is in any way significant this is often not the case.

The inherent ‘plasticity’ of the brain can occasionally mean that areas damaged beyond healing can relocate their function to other undamaged areas (the so-called ‘Kennard principle’) and there are documented cases where this has indeed happened. However, it is frequently the case that the functions associated with the damaged areas never fully develop and these deficits can present as significant disabilities or difficulties in later life.

A significant proportion of the prior learning and the development of skills which has already taken place within an adult’s brain can often be retained post injury. However, a brain at the earlier stages of development, if damaged, might never develop the capacity to learn those skills, leading to subsequent difficulties that could manifest themselves physically, socially, emotionally and educationally.

Potential general effects

The effects can range from the relatively mild to the catastrophic but all will, to some degree, affect the child’s ability to function within an educational and / or social setting. Educational attainment and quality of life indicators for young adult survivors of childhood acquired brain injury are significantly lower than those of an uninjured peer group.

Because a child’s brain is a ‘work in progress’, deficits caused by an injury sustained at one age might not become apparent until much later, as the damaged areas become relevant to the child’s expected developmental milestones.

This is known as the 'sleeper effect' and where adults observing the child are unaware either of the injury itself or of the potential effects of an ABI, this can often lead to a misattribution of the failure to achieve academically and socially as ‘laziness’, ‘teenage tantrums’ and ‘going off the rails’.

It is evident that damage to specific areas of the brain can result in whole areas of knowledge, skills and abilities being lost, sometimes irrevocably. However, it is also often the case that although some cognitive abilities can be left intact, (including the ability to retrieve, process and manipulate information) and much prior learning can remain, a child can be prevented from developing academically and socially because of other, more functional, deficits.

Potential social disadvantage

There are many ways in which a child with an ABI can become socially disadvantaged and alienated from his or her peers following an injury and the following are only indicative of the problems that might follow reintroduction to their peer group.

A common sequela of brain injury is a much reduced ability to process information and therefore to respond to it promptly. This can mean that a child is unable to keep up with the conversational flow of a group of friends and can be slower than the rest of the group to pick up on jokes and ‘banter’, leaving him/her feeling frustrated and left behind. However caring and well meaning, the friends can also find it difficult to accommodate this new slowness into their usual give and take, resulting in the affected child being alienated and left out.

Another effect often seen as a result of damage to the vulnerable frontal lobes of a child’s brain is ‘disinhibition’ or a reduced ability to inhibit an impulse to say or do something long enough to calculate whether it’s the correct or appropriate thing to say or do. Research shows that adolescence is the time when the frontal lobe areas of the brain - the areas that govern the ability to manage one’s behaviours - develop enough to allow a child to begin to ‘grow up’ and start to inhibit their initial impulses.

Disinhibition can lead to a child saying apparently hurtful or aggressive things to peers, leading to antagonism and embarrassment.

It can also be the case that because of this, a child with an ABI will be less able to inhibit their responses to other provocations, such as adult authority, resulting in apparent ‘bad’ behaviour, leading their friends (or their friends’ parents) to view them as unsuitable companions.

Disinhibition can also lead to sexually harmful behaviour, particularly when coupled with a lowered sense of risk and danger and a child with a brain injury can often become vulnerable to exploitation by peers or by strangers.

A reduced ability to access and to process language and therefore to ‘word find’ appropriately can result in an increased inclination to use a more readily accessible word - such as a swear word or a more aggressive word - and this can obviously alienate and concern friends, who could interpret this as anger or aggression.

Potential emotional effects

Everything we are, everything we are able to do and everything we feel is governed by the functioning of our brain. What we grow to see as fundamentally ‘me’ is a product of our brain and the experiences that have shaped it.

When a child experiences a brain injury, its effects could alter his or her academic abilities, likes and dislikes, friendship groups, talents and skills, plans for the future, relationships with parents and siblings, physical prowess - everything that made the child the person they knew themselves to be.

The dissonance between the self-image pre injury and the new one post injury can be experienced as a real trauma, as the child tries to come to terms with the new ‘me’, the ‘death’ of the old one and the limitations possibly imposed by the effects of the injury.

The loss of academic or sporting status, the indifference or antagonism of their peer group, the curtailing of their developing independence because of understandable parental worry, could all be experienced by a brain injured child or adolescent as almost a bereavement.

It is not unusual for a brain injured child to experience feelings of worthlessness, depression and loss.

Family relationships could also suffer as a result of the injury, as parents struggle to come to terms with the same feelings of bereavement of their plans and hopes for their child, for their family unit and for the life they lived together before the injury. Siblings also could find it hard to come to terms with the loss of the brother or sister they knew and loved and with the amount of time, attention and emotional energy their parents have expended on the injured child.

Potential misattribution of effects

A childhood acquired brain injury can have a huge variety of effects on the child, at different times during the development of their brain function. Depending on how well informed another person is about the injury and about the nature of brain development, it can often be easy to ascribe aspects of a child’s behaviour (or ‘presentation’) to the wrong underlying reason. It is, for example, common for parents and teachers to misread the effects of a cognitive impairment for a physical issue and a physical problem for a ‘behavioural’ one.

An example of this could be a child who has great difficulty in ‘initiating’ a task or in sequencing elements of a simple task. When the child fails to respond to what appears to be a straightforward instruction, for example ‘put away your art work then go over there and get changed for PE’, and is found still to be sitting at his desk five minutes later, the teacher might reach the conclusion that he is lazy or defiant.

Similarly, a child who has a visual impairment as a result of her injury could be mistaken for being clumsy and uncoordinated or just thoughtless, when she knocks over the milk jug or for being scatterbrained and inattentive when she neglects to complete the maths. problems written on the right hand side of the board.

Conclusion

In order to ensure that children showing the effects of a brain injury are able to fulfil their potential, it is important that these effects are taken into account when planning and delivering a child’s school curriculum. It is also important that teachers are aware of the possible presence in their classroom of a child with an ABI and of what its effects are likely to be.

Childhood ABI currently does not feature in the content of any UK teacher training programme, neither is it mentioned as a discrete element of any SEN specialist teaching qualification.

Many children displaying the effects of an ABI have been educated in a variety of inappropriate ways, including in the lower academic streams of mainstream schools; in a range of special schools, primarily designed for learners with other learning difficulties and in schools specialising in working with young people with social, emotional and behavioural disorders.