Learning from Stories We Thought Were Just Entertainment

When we talk about children in care, early years trauma or early bereavement, we often turn to professional language such as attachment theory, trauma responses, adverse childhood experiences, regulation and resilience.

But long before many of us learned this language, we were already being shown ways to improve our understanding.

Through children’s television, family films and animated stories, we were quietly introduced to the emotional realities of loss, neglect, separation and belonging. These stories didn’t explain trauma, they showed it. They helped us feel it, often without us realising.

This resource explores how familiar, mainstream films and TV programmes have shaped our understanding of children’s inner worlds and how they can help adults reconnect with empathy when understanding feels difficult.

Why Stories Matter

Stories reach places that policies and training sometimes cannot.

They bypass defensiveness. They soften judgement. They invite us to sit alongside a character rather than analyse them. For children and adults alike, stories create emotional understanding before cognitive understanding.

When behaviour feels confusing, confronting or hard to manage, these narratives remind us of a vital truth:

Behaviour is often a response to what has been lost, not a reflection of who a child is.

Lessons Hidden in Plain Sight

Tracy Beaker: Life in Care, Told From the Inside

Tracy Beaker follows a young girl growing up in a children’s home, told largely from her own perspective. The programme centres everyday life in care; friendships, conflict, school, carers, rules and transitions rather than dramatic plot points. This normalisation is part of its power.

To the audience, Tracy is presented as witty, outspoken, defiant and emotionally expressive. Her behaviour often feels exaggerated for humour, yet it consistently reflects a child living with instability, loss and unmet attachment needs. She tests adults, breaks rules, rejects kindness and boasts about independence. While simultaneously yearning for permanence and love.

What the programme quietly teaches is that children in care are not defined by a single trait or label. Tracy’s behaviour shifts depending on how safe she feels, how predictable adults are and whether she believes she will be rejected.

From a trauma-informed perspective, Tracy Beaker helps us understand:

how rejection sensitivity develops after repeated loss
why children may push adults away before attachment can form
how humour, defiance and bravado function as protection
why consistency matters more than authority

The series invites the viewer to see the world from the child’s internal experience, not just adult judgement. A vital foundation for compassionate care.

Matilda: When Emotional Neglect Goes Unnamed

Matilda is a beloved book and film that most of us have come across at some point in our lives, for many this will have been viewed during our childhood. What we see is a gifted, book-loving girl with a strong sense of right and wrong. She is continually ignored by her parents who instead want to watch tv and bullied by her head teacher Miss Trunchball. When she discovers her telekinetic powers, we see her put her new powers to use to stand up against the cruelty she feels and sees. Finding her place with her supportive teacher Miss Honey.

Looking deeper, it presents the story of a highly capable child growing up in an emotionally neglectful and psychologically unsafe home. While her basic needs are met, her emotional needs are consistently dismissed, ridiculed or ignored. This portrayal reflects a form of harm that is often misunderstood or minimised.

To the audience, Matilda appears resilient, imaginative and clever. What sits beneath this, however, is a child who has learned to self-soothe through withdrawal into books, fantasy and her inner world. The film shows how children adapt creatively to survive environments where they are unseen.

The contrast between harmful adults and one attuned, caring teacher is central. Change does not come through discipline or correction, but through recognition, belief and emotional safety.

This story helps viewers understand:

that neglect can be subtle and still deeply damaging
why some children appear “independent” long before they should
how imagination and dissociation can be coping strategies
the transformative impact of one consistent, emotionally available adult

Matilda reframes success not as achievement, but as being known and valued.

Instant Family: Love Does Not Erase Trauma Overnight

Instant Family follows a couple who foster, and later attempt to adopt, three siblings from the care system. What it presents is a heart-warming and ultimately feel good film about a family slowly connecting with each other. Pete and Eve wish to start fostering children, picturing one small child, what pans out is them fostering three siblings including a rebellious teenager. We see them adapt to parent hood, help navigate the siblings individual needs as well as the foster system. Ultimately forming a family together with all of the children.

While framed as a mainstream family film, it offers a relatively honest portrayal of the emotional realities of fostering.

The children are presented to the audience as complex, contradictory and guarded. They resist closeness, challenge boundaries, express anger and sabotage moments of safety. Their behaviour often appears disproportionate to the situation until their histories are considered.

The film shows how trauma responses can be triggered by kindness as much as threat, and how fear of rejection can lead children to reject adults first.

From a trauma-informed lens, Instant Family helps viewers understand:

why trust develops slowly after early loss
how loyalty to birth family can coexist with fear and anger
why children may test whether adults will leave
that love alone does not heal trauma without safety and patience

It challenges simplified narratives of rescue, replacing them with the reality that care is relational, demanding and deeply emotional.

Lion: Early Loss Leaves a Lifelong Imprint

Lion is based on the true story of a child separated from his family, placed in institutional care and later adopted internationally. While much of the film focuses on adulthood, its emotional core lies in early childhood loss.

To the audience, the story presents trauma as something that does not end when circumstances improve. Despite a loving adoptive family and outward success, the impact of early separation resurfaces years later through intrusive memories, restlessness and a persistent sense of something unresolved.

The film illustrates how trauma can be stored beyond conscious memory and how early experiences shape identity, belonging and felt safety.

It helps viewers understand:

that early trauma can re-emerge later in life
how fragmented memories relate to early developmental loss
why identity questions are common for care-experienced and adopted people
that healing is not linear or time-limited

Lion encourages adults to hold a longer view of children’s lives, recognising that early loss can echo across the lifespan.

Paddington: Belonging as a Healing Force

Paddington is possibly one of the most beloved and recognisable fictional characters in the UK. We all know of his kind-hearted nature, love of marmalade sandwiches and his ability to innocently or naively get into trouble. What we often don’t think about is what his character also represents, a young person who is lost, alone and in a very unfamiliar setting, being found, accepted and adopted by a loving family.

At first glance, Paddington is a light-hearted family film. Underneath, it is a story about displacement, bereavement and the search for safety in unfamiliar systems.

Paddington arrives in London alone, having lost his caregivers. He is confused by rules, misunderstood by authority figures and repeatedly placed at risk of rejection. Yet he continues to approach the world with hope.

The audience is guided to feel empathy rather than suspicion. Paddington’s mistakes are framed as misunderstandings, not malice.

From a trauma-informed perspective, the film helps us see:

how disorientation and fear can look like disobedience
why kindness and patience build safety
how consistency creates trust
the healing power of being welcomed rather than managed

Paddington subtly reinforces that belonging is not earned through compliance, it is offered through relationships.

Lilo & Stitch: When Grief Looks Like ‘Bad Behaviour’

Lilo & Stitch is an iconic children’s film from the early 2000s, so iconic that it recently had an modern live action adaptation to introduce it to a new generation of children.

The film centres on a young girl who has experienced the sudden death of her parents and is being cared for by her older sister. The story presents a family under strain, navigating grief, role changes and external scrutiny.

Lilo is portrayed as emotionally intense, impulsive and socially isolated. To the audience, her behaviour is clearly linked to unresolved grief and fear of further loss, even when adults within the story struggle to see this.

Rather than correcting Lilo’s behaviour through punishment, the narrative reframes her actions as expressions of pain and longing for connection.

This film helps viewers understand:

how grief can present as dysregulation in children
why emotional expression may feel overwhelming or chaotic
how fear of abandonment shapes behaviour
the importance of keeping families together wherever possible

Its overarching message of “Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten” speaks directly to children who fear loss and separation.

What These Stories Teach Us

For many of us, some of the underlying messages of these tv shows and films would not have been understood right away. instead they will have been something we picked up on repeat viewings or a way of framing something we were unfamiliar with in a subtle way that only became apparent at a later date.

Across different genres and audiences, these stories consistently show us that:

behaviour is shaped by experience
trauma is often invisible
children adapt to survive
healing happens through relationships, not control

They remind us that many of the children we support are not being difficult, they are being honest about what they have lived through.

Using Stories as a Learning Tool

What makes these stories so powerful is how they can help people of all ages learn more about how trauma might present itself and what different behaviours might be communicating.

For parents and carers it can help clarify why certain behaviours are being presented, what support might be needed and help make difficult situations easier to understand.

For children it can help explain why they or children around them are acting a certain way. It can help build empathy towards those around them and enable them to look deeper than surface level.

For professionals it can help identify children and young people who may need additional support and how that support might be offered to those who need it.

Each piece of media offers: