Insights

Trauma-informed care is more than understanding the impact of trauma. It’s about changing how we respond to people when they are struggling. Collaborative Problem Solving^® offers a practical, evidence-based approach for putting those principles into action.

When a child or young person is struggling to meet expectations, manage emotions, or respond flexibly to those around them, adults often focus on changing their behavior.

But what if the behavior is communicating that something is getting in the way?

A child who refuses, shuts down, becomes aggressive, argues, or has difficulty transitioning may not be choosing to be difficult. They may be struggling with skills such as flexibility, frustration tolerance, emotional regulation, perspective-taking, or problem-solving.

Collaborative Problem Solving^® (CPS) starts from a different understanding: kids do well if they can.

Rather than assuming a child lacks motivation or needs stronger consequences, CPS helps adults understand what is getting in the way and work with the child to solve the problems contributing to challenging behavior.

This makes CPS particularly well aligned with the principles of trauma-informed care.

What Does Trauma-Informed Care Really Mean?

Trauma-informed care recognizes that experiences of trauma and chronic stress can affect how people understand, respond to, and interact with the world around them.

But being trauma-informed isn't simply about knowing someone's history. In many situations, adults don't know—and don't need to know—whether a child has experienced trauma.

The more important question is: How can we interact with this child in a way that promotes safety, connection, dignity, regulation, and skill development?

That is where CPS can help.

CPS is an evidence-based, trauma-informed practice that can be used with children and young people across settings, including schools, homes, clinical programs, and therapeutic and residential environments.

At its core, CPS changes the way adults understand challenging behavior and how they respond.

From "What's Wrong with This Child?" to "What's Getting in the Way?"

One of the most important shifts in CPS is moving away from viewing challenging behavior as a problem of motivation.

Traditional approaches often assume that if a child isn't meeting an expectation, the child needs to be motivated to do better—through rewards, consequences, incentives, or punishment.

CPS asks a different question: What skills or circumstances are making this expectation difficult for this child right now?

This shift matters for all children, but it can be particularly important when working with children who have experienced trauma or chronic stress.

Instead of seeing a child's behavior as intentional defiance, manipulation, or a lack of respect, adults learn to look for the underlying lagging skills and unsolved problems.

The goal isn't to excuse challenging behavior.

The goal is to understand it well enough to address what is actually getting in the way.

Five Ways Collaborative Problem Solving Puts Trauma-Informed Care into Practice

1. It prioritizes understanding before intervention.
   When a child is struggling, the first step isn't necessarily to tell them what they need to do differently.It's to understand their experience.

   Adults use CPS to practice curiosity and careful listening to understand the child's concerns and perspective about a problem. This can help create a sense of safety and connection that makes productive problem-solving possible.

2. It reduces reliance on power and control. 

   Trauma-informed care asks adults to consider how their practices may affect a person's sense of safety, autonomy, and dignity.CPS provides an alternative to relying on power and control to make children comply. It aims to reduce the power differential that is so dysregulating for children who have experienced chronic stress and trauma. And CPS has been shown to reduce punitive disciplinary practices that are used disproportionately with children with trauma histories and can risk retraumatizing these youth.

   CPS provides concrete tools to shift away from power and control toward collaboration, with the goal of reducing challenging behavior while building skills and relationships.

3. It recognizes the importance of regulation and relationships. 

   When people are overwhelmed, their ability to access higher-order thinking skills can be compromised.This is one reason the concepts and sequence of Regulate, Relate, Reason, developed by our colleague, Dr. Bruce Perry, are so useful in understanding CPS. The order of the steps in the problem-solving process in CPS turns these principles into actions.

   The problem-solving process begins with empathy and understanding to regulate the child before the child is asked to relate to the adult’s concern, and only after both perspectives are understood do the adults invite the child to reason with them by brainstorming solutions.

4. It builds skills instead of simply managing behavior. 

   A trauma-informed approach should do more than help adults get through the immediate crisis. It should help children develop the skills they need to navigate future challenges.CPS identifies skills that many children struggle with—including flexibility, frustration tolerance, emotional regulation, problem-solving, and perspective-taking—as a result of their exposure to trauma and creates opportunities to practice those skills in the context of real-life problems.

   This is one of the fundamental differences between CPS and approaches that focus primarily on behavior management.

Collaborative Problem Solving Is Not About Lowering Expectations

A common misconception is that a trauma-informed or collaborative approach means being permissive or eliminating expectations. Children still need to learn skills. Schools still need students to participate. Families still need routines to work. Therapeutic programs still have important expectations and responsibilities.

With CPS, adults pursue their expectations and concerns. They just do so through collaboration rather than command-and-control.

From Trauma-Informed Principles to Everyday Practice

It is one thing for someone or an organization to say it is trauma-informed.

It is another for a teacher, parent, clinician, or direct-care staff member to know what to do when a child is refusing, shutting down, becoming aggressive, or struggling to manage frustration. And to do it in a way that is consistent with the principles of being trauma-informed.

That's where CPS can make a difference.

CPS translates broad principles—such as empathy, connection, collaboration, respect, regulation, and skill development—into a practical process adults can use during everyday interactions.

And importantly, CPS is not reserved for children with a history of trauma. It is an approach for understanding and responding to challenging behavior that can benefit all children, including those experiencing social, emotional, and behavioral challenges.

When adults shift from trying to control behavior to understanding and solving the problems that contribute to it, they create opportunities for something more lasting than compliance.

They create opportunities for children to build skills.

They create opportunities for stronger relationships.

And they create opportunities for children to experience adults as partners in solving problems—not simply as people who impose solutions.

That is what makes Collaborative Problem Solving^® a powerful, practical approach to trauma-informed care.