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• Posted April 29, 2026

Online Program Soothes Post-Trauma Stress In Injured Children

Car crashes, sports injuries, bad falls, severe burns and other sources of trauma can leave lasting scars in the minds of children and teens.

Nearly half of children who’ve experienced physical trauma suffer from lasting post-traumatic stress symptoms, researchers say.

But a new online program can help these kids get past these hidden mental wounds, researchers reported April 27 in JAMA Pediatrics.

The relatively brief program — Reducing Stress After Trauma (ReSeT) — significantly reduced post-trauma stress in children randomly who were chosen to take it, researchers found.

“ReSeT effect sizes were comparable with those of randomized clinical trials with face-to-face therapists, more sessions, and more intervention hours,” concluded the research team led by Linda Ewing-Cobbs, chair of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

Kids with post-traumatic stress tend to relive the event that hurt them, steer clear of things that remind them of their trauma, become easily startled and irritable, have trouble sleeping, and have persistent negative moods that include fear, sadness, numbness and detachment, researchers said.

“For example, if an injury was due to a car accident, maybe avoiding getting into a car or avoiding the area where the accident happened, maybe avoiding the streets altogether,” said Mayer Bellehsen, a clinical psychologist and assistant vice president in the Behavioral Health Service Line at Northwell Health in Bay Shore, New York.

“Having negative thoughts as well is a common symptom —worries about the world being an unsafe place, for instance, and as a result of that, greater anxiety and fear, associated with that could be a greater sense of restlessness and hypervigilance that results in losing sleep and feeling keyed up and on edge,” added Bellehsen, who reviewed the findings.

The eight-session ReSeT program includes three to four short interactive videos that children completed independently, with each module taking less than 20 minutes to complete, researchers said.

After each module, children have an electronic health session with a therapist to practice ways to manage and reduce stress related to memories of their trauma.

"I think this study was truly novel and innovative in that it's one of the first of its kind to evaluate an intervention that is hybrid for both utilizing online modules along with psychotherapy support by a provider to treat children affected by the trauma of injuries and medical stressors," Bellehsen said.

To test the program, 47 children between 8 and 17 years of age with post-traumatic stress were randomly chosen to take the ReSeT program. Another 46 received usual care following their injuries.

At regular intervals, all children and parents completed a questionnaire that assessed post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Results showed that children who participated in ReSeT had significantly lower post-traumatic stress at 10 weeks and six months following their injuries, compared to those who received usual care.

Boys particularly benefitted from ReSeT, winding up with the lowest post-traumatic stress scores of all, researchers said.

“The ReSeT program pulls from the elements that we know to be very useful in treating traumatic stress after traumatic events, and that are incorporated into standard trauma treatments, such as trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy,” said Bellehsen, who was not involved in the study.

“The novel part of this treatment is that there's a good amount that can be done autonomously, at one's own pace utilizing the web services or the online services and modules, then supported by follow-up conversations with a psychotherapist, which allows the intervention and the program to be more greatly scaled because it utilizes less individual therapist time,” he said.

However, more research is needed to validate the ReSeT program, and to determine how it might be best embedded into trauma care for children, researchers said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about post-traumatic stress disorder in children.

SOURCES: JAMA Pediatrics, April 27, 2026; Mayer Bellehsen, clinical psychologist and assistant vice president, Behavioral Health Service Line, Northwell Health, Bay Shore, New York