Trauma is an inevitable part of human experience: hard things happen to many children. Trauma is defined as an outside event or experience, rendering the young person temporarily helpless and breaking past ordinary coping and defensive operations.  When children are surprised by trauma, the body’s alarm system activates a surge of stress hormones; the body freezes in fear and then reacts with fight/flight instincts to cope with the perceived danger.
Helplessness is a hallmark of childhood traumas, because children do not have sufficient coping resources to manage without serious cost to their development.