When a child’s defiance may be a signal of racial trauma

Clinical psychologist Steven Kniffley Jr. urged Indianapolis educators and youth workers to look beyond behaviour and ask what experiences may be driving a child’s distress.

At a gathering in Indianapolis, a child’s behaviour was treated not as the whole story, but as a possible signal of pain. Steven Kniffley Jr., a clinical psychologist whose work focuses on Black male mental health and racial trauma, urged educators and youth workers to shift from asking, “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” The distinction, he argued, changes how adults understand disruption, defiance and silence in young people’s lives.

The event, hosted by VOICES on Friday, Oct. 9, brought together teachers, counsellors, health professionals, student advocates and juvenile re-entry workers to examine how racism and chronic stress can shape mental health and family life. According to the Indianapolis Recorder, Kniffley challenged the group to look beyond discipline records and classroom incidents and consider what experiences might be driving them. One parent in the room described repeated suspensions involving her son, and how those incidents coincided with a need for his father to manage out-of-school discipline.

Kniffley framed racial trauma as psychological harm linked to racism and repeated discrimination. He described several patterns that can feed that stress, including exclusionary treatment in spaces where Black people have historically been shut out, subtle slights and gatekeeping, dismissals of lived experience, and the burden of witnessing racism directed at others. That accumulation, he suggested, can leave children and families carrying distress that is easy to miss if adults focus only on outward conduct.

The discussion also underscored that racial trauma does not appear the same way in every child. Kniffley noted that it is not a standalone diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and not everyone exposed to racism develops post-traumatic stress disorder. But a child who lacks the words, trust or support to describe what is happening may still communicate distress through actions rather than language. That is why, advocates at the event said, behavioural responses deserve careful attention before they are punished or misread.

Kniffley’s message was consistent with his broader work beyond Indianapolis. WKMS reported in July 2024 that he helped develop the Kniffley Racial Trauma Therapy Model in Louisville, Kentucky, an approach shaped by African-centred psychology and liberation psychology and supported by federal funding. Research published in February 2024 in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy also found that racial trauma therapy training improved clinicians’ ability to respond to these issues, reinforcing the need for culturally informed care. Earlier reporting by the Associated Press, cited by the University of Cincinnati, found that Black children can begin experiencing race-based traumatic stress as early as age four to six, with repeated discrimination affecting their mental health. Against that backdrop, Kniffley’s core point in Indianapolis was simple: accountability matters, but so does curiosity about what a child has lived through.