At the Attachment & Trauma Network, we have spent decades supporting children and families navigating the realities of attachment and developmental trauma. Over the years, a clear pattern has taken shape. We, as a nation, focus on resourcing individuals while leaving harmful systems largely intact.
That is no longer, and has never been, a sustainable approach.
For ATN, advocacy is not a pivot. It is the next logical step in alignment with our mission to promote healing for children impacted by trauma by strengthening the families, schools, and communities surrounding them. Moving forward, we are formalizing that commitment with the launch of the ATN Advocacy Taskforce.
Introducing the ATN Advocacy Task Force
The Advocacy Task Force has been assembled to bring structure, discernment, and strategic alignment to ATN’s advocacy efforts. This task force is headed by current board members Ingrid Cockhren & Nicole Tuchinda.
The task force is responsible for reviewing and evaluating advocacy requests from the ATN community, determining whether and how ATN should engage, and ensuring that every position we take advances healing, prevention, and systemic alignment. The task force is charged with assessing whether advocacy efforts reduce trauma or strengthen conditions for healing. We will strive for a nonpartisan, cross-sector approach to child wellbeing. The task force will also ensure that all efforts do not undermine our capacity, credibility, or mission alignment.
Our Current Reality
In the United States, children are not experiencing isolated challenges. They are developing inside overlapping systems of stress and trauma that reinforce each other in real time. That convergence is what is driving ATN’s move into advocacy.
The Top 4 Areas Where Advocacy Is Now Essential
1. Family System Stressors, ACEs, and Economic Instability
This is the foundation layer.
- Abuse, neglect, household dysfunction
- Caregiver burnout, mental illness, and substance use
- Poverty, housing instability, food insecurity
These are not separate issues. They are mutually reinforcing. Economic stress dysregulates caregivers; dysregulated caregivers disrupt attachment; disrupted attachment becomes developmental trauma.
This is not about parenting deficits. This is about systems that are failing to stabilize the environments children depend on. Advocacy here means pushing for policies that strengthen families, not just intervene after crisis.
2. Mental Health Crisis + Lack of Access to Care
We lack the mental health infrastructure to meet the current level of need. COVID-19 and the 2020 lockdowns were a collective trauma that exacerbated existing issues. The current landscape involves:
Rising anxiety, depression, suicidality
Chronic stress exposure beginning earlier in life
Major gaps in access to mental health services, caused in part by $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid
We are witnessing rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality in children, caregivers, and families, while access to care remains fragmented and insufficient. Currently, children are carrying unprocessed stress without adequate support.
Advocacy in this space is about closing the gap between identification and intervention. We must ensure that access to trauma-informed, developmentally appropriate care is not a privilege.
3. The American Child Experiences Constant Exposure to Environmental & Social Threats
Violence, bullying, and digital exposure have collapsed the boundaries between harmful and safe environments. There is no longer a clear “safe zone.”
Children are navigating:
- School shootings and community violence
- Cyberbullying, social comparison, and identity fragmentation
- Digital overstimulation
- A national discourse that stigmatizes LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, immigrants, and low-income individuals
These are not episodic stressors. In today’s social media/smartphone culture, these stressors are continuous inputs shaping brain development and nervous system function.
Advocacy must address the conditions and environments, not just the apparent and predictable outcomes.
4. Structural & Political Stressors: Discrimination, Immigration & Systemic Harm
This is where policy becomes personal.
- Racism, LGBTQIA+ and identity-based discrimination, cultural invalidation
- Children in immigrant families facing raids, separation, and chronic fear
- Documented and undocumented children experiencing the trauma of immigration crackdowns
- Children held in ICE detention facilities exposed to confinement and prolonged uncertainty
When actions focus on systemic harm, there is often hesitation. However, this is where clarity is most needed.
Children are not shielded from systemic forces. They are shaped by them. Racism, discrimination, immigration enforcement, family separation, and detention… These are not just legislative, policy, or leadership issues. They are direct assaults on safety, belonging, and identity. These are the issues that are guaranteed to have generational impact.
Advocacy here requires courage. Because neutrality, in these conditions, becomes complicity, and neutrality means having to pick up the pieces later and unnecessarily rebuilding. Children deserve advocacy now that protects their health and well-being.
Trauma Intersects
These four areas do not operate independently. They are often compounded. A child can be navigating caregiver stress, economic instability, online harm, and fear of family separation all at once. Our systems are not designed to withstand collective trauma recovery. Our systems are not yet trauma-informed or healing-centered.
The Future of ATN Advocacy
The launch of the Advocacy Taskforce marks a shift from support to systems influence. In the years ahead, ATN will engage more directly in conversations about policy and law. We will intentionally equip caregivers and professionals with the awareness needed to advocate within their own communities. We will build partnerships that extend the reach of trauma-informed and healing-centered practices. We will advocate for and model clear, values-aligned advocacy positions on the real and relevant issues impacting children and families.
Because we understand trauma, ATN has a responsibility to respond to what the work has revealed.
