"Trauma" has both a medical and a psychiatric definition. Medically, "trauma" refers to a serious or critical bodily injury, wound, or shock. This definition is often associated with trauma medicine practiced in emergency rooms and represents a popular view of the term. Psychiatrically, "trauma" has assumed a different meaning and refers to an experience that is emotionally painful, distressful, or shocking, which often results in lasting mental and physical effects.

Exposure to traumatic stress during childhood can impact a child for life. This impact can range from increasing risk for heart disease or alcoholism to actually causing a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder such as PTSD. Children are not born resilient; they are made resilient by virtue of having opportunities in early childhood to have elements of safety, predictability and nurturing. Yet even children with these opportunities, given a sufficiently intense or repeated traumatic stress will be at risk. Children are, in fact, born malleable. They are shaped by their experiences in ways that can follow them for a lifetime. The very same neurobiological mechanisms that make children so capable of absorbing new experiences in such a short time (e.g., language, motor skills) make them more vulnerable to bad experiences. There is a cost to traumatic stress in childhood. With changes in public policy and professional practices, however, which address prevention and effective early intervention, we can decrease this cost and help children meet their potential in emotional, cognitive, social and physical domains.
NIMH, 2001

Treatments usually incorporate three elements: 1) review and recollection of the traumatic experience; 2) information about the normal and expected processes of post-traumatic functioning and 3) focus on specific symptoms. There are many ways to do this. The unfortunate reality however, is that most traumatized children do not get any help what so ever. This is in part due to the adult world's lack of understanding about childhood trauma and the destructive false belief that children are "resilient." Those children who do get services often have limited access and brief contacts.

Perry, Bruce D., Trauma and Terror
in Childhood