Children’s Village

Written by Vanessa Moos

Have you ever felt the air change before a storm? The silence, still leaves, the water calms, the air stops moving. Usually, in that moment, if you’re like me, you were in awe of the beauty of the peace. Has the sky ever been so clear? Has the air ever smelled so fresh? Has your soul ever felt as calm as it did in that moment? The calm before the storm.

The wind picks up, the leaves bristle; the windows feel inverted and your ears pop. A distant crack of thunder alerts you to the impending storm. The trees sway, the wind circles, the rain seems to come from nowhere and yet crashes everywhere.

The moments before the storm, the feeling of the air changing, knowing the weather is coming – this is much like our work with the families in our community. Sometimes, the wind subsides, and families enter our system in the calm. Maybe they are trying to stay ahead and can see a gap in their resources; maybe it’s a grandparent trying to figure out where they can access the community support system to support their grandchildren while their adult children sort themselves out; most times when a family enters our system, we can feel the the wind change as the phone rings or our front door opens and the rain of a family crisis takes hold of our offices and homes at Children’s Village.

We live in the most beautiful place in the world. I can confidently say that our Coeur d’Alene is what many dream about as an abode. To grab coffee with Canfield in view, snow covered and lovely; to drive to a meeting downtown and sit at a red light in awe of the fog over a lake, the beauty of which can only be seen in paintings; our fortune of living in North Idaho is beyond most words.

Still, there are hard things happening here in Coeur d’Alene. You may not know us, but we’re two residential homes and a counseling clinic for families in crisis. With the community’s assistance, we say yes as much as we can. For most in our community, if they don’t specifically look for it, they may miss the hard things happening altogether. When the school year started, letters arrived in our mailbox at Children’s Village approving a child for free and reduced lunch at school; the problem was that we had no idea who those families were that were using our address. From the service vantage point, their use of our address is a sign of homelessness without wanting to ask for help: this is a signal of an impending storm.

For 34 years, Children’s Village has been an omni-present force to keep children safe; funded by our community, we have helped hundreds of children and families towards a path of success. In our infancy, we sheltered any child at any time. Almost a decade ago, we started seeing the needs of the community changing – no longer were we receiving calls for infants, we started receiving calls for older youth in behavior crises.

Raising kids is hard, I say this on a personal note because as a mom of two boys, this journey may be the most testing one of my life, even with having a devoted and involved husband with me. Every family needs a village to help, every person needs to be ok asking for help and every community member needs to be there for their neighbor.

A decade ago, we started weathering an unexpected storm: the children in our care were exhibiting extensive signs of trauma. What looked like a child misbehaving to the average eye were actually signs of trauma-responses to our therapist’s eye. And so we battened down the hatches of the Children’s Village ship, we put on our rain gear, and we made sure our rain boots were tied tightly so we could get through the night.

Children’s Village intentionally shifted gears during the storm of our changing community; at the end of the storm, when the sun came out, Children’s Village was at the forefront of a local movement towards trauma-informed care. Through a local coalition of mental health providers and professionals in the area, our organization became one of the first Trust-Based Relational Intervention trained facilities in the Pacific Northwest, and our local county followed the lead of our clinician. Luckily, we were also about two years ahead of fascinatingly complex federal mandates that would soon force us into this direction through the Families First Act.

Trauma-informed sounds like a buzz word, but I can assure you it is much deeper and more impactful. Children who have hard experiences in their young lives learn to cope in fight or flight; unfortunately, more than not, these kids actually get stuck in the fight mode. No longer can they understand the impact of a behavior, instead, they lose the ability to understand natural consequences of their behaviors. These Adverse Childhood Experiences vary, but are peer-reviewed as a known pivot point in a child’s life.

Hard experiences come out in different ways. Children who know hard experiences may lash out at school when they don’t like a boundary, they may punch a friend because they don’t like a decision or feel left out, children who know hard experiences may use the language they hear at home because they’re unable to