Trauma-informed parenting

We’re wary of blaming parents for any difficulties that arise with their children; but that means we’re blaming the children instead and escalating the scandal that is the medicating of young people, says psychotherapist Gayle Williamson

“I’d just gone in to wake him up ..but again he refused to get out of bed. I tried to stay calm but we ended up having another screaming match,” my client was describing her stressful morning with one of her two children. “Eventually he gets up but then everything was a struggle.. finding a clean shirt for him to wear.. then he couldn’t find his shoes. I’m trying to help him while also keeping an eye on his sister and make breakfast for them. 

“How I eventually got them both in the car for school, I don’t know. Then to top it all, my daughter forgot her sports kit, so I had to go back to the school again later and drop it off!”

“Remind me how old they are again, Emma?” I asked.

“He’s 15, and the other is 13.”

My client’s own experience as a child was very different – she got herself up, fed herself and cycled four miles to the train then got a connecting bus to her school, all from the age of 8. Her parents worked hard, provided for her practical needs, but weren’t emotionally in tune with her; and as an only child, she was lonely. A lot of warmth and attention and noticing was missing from her childhood.

Now if this was your experience, I think it can go one of two main ways if you go on to have your own children – you’ll either, despite best intentions, treat your child as you were treated and repeat your own relational trauma; or you will do everything you can to ensure your child never feels like you did. Perhaps most commonly, you’ll vacillate between the two – one part of you tries to be the perfect mother or father and makes you forget about your own needs; and then another part of you gets exhausted and fed up with this and eventually lashes out in some way at your ‘ungrateful’, ‘difficult’, or ‘demanding’ children.

Balancing act

It’s hard to get the balance right: taking care of children and minding your own needs; and ensuring children feel secure and loved, while at the same time fostering their eventual independence from you – which is, of course, one of a parent’s main tasks, equipping your child to one day leave you and be able to thrive on their own. So at a basic level, if I don’t ever expect my child to get himself out of bed in the morning, he’s going to be in for a very rude awakening in the adult world of college and work. 

One of the first things you learn as a therapist is, if you help your client too much, if you treat them as though they are helpless, you leave them weak. Similarly, if I help my children too much, I leave them weak; I deprive them of discovering their own autonomy and strength; they don’t gain the guidance and skills they need to thrive in an adult world. But also, I’ve encountered so many clients over the years who would say their main caregiver was always present, would do anything for them; but that emotionally, they just weren’t there.

“Many people have children before

they are ready to do so; or they have

children for the wrong reasons”

We’re often very wary of ‘blaming’ parents, of making them feel bad in any way. It seems the minute anything negative might be said about a parent, the conversation is quickly shut down with “we mustn’t blame the parents, it’s a very tough job; they’re exhausted”. But if we can’t ‘blame’ the parent, ie. put the responsibility where it belongs, that only means any problem is then located in the child. And it’s part of what results in scores of children being diagnosed with so-called medical conditions like ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ or ‘oppositional defiant disorder’ or the catch-all ‘autism spectrum disorder’ (ASD). 

Unproven illnesses

These diagnoses are unproven as biological illnesses despite decades of research and attempts to equate emotional distress with physical illness. Some children tragically suffer brain damage in utero, but even the woman who came up with the ASD diagnosis, Prof Uta Frith, expressed concerns in 2021 about how elastic it has become, so that, for example, children with social difficulties can be labelled autistic rather than understood as struggling with some kind of relational trauma or even just shyness. To be clear, no one is saying that the symptoms aren’t real; it’s their assumed cause that we should all have a problem with, and that often the only treatment option is medication.

New figures released in June by the Health Service Executive showed that there has been a staggering 130 per cent increase in anti-depressant prescriptions for under-15s over the past 10 years.

 All too commonly, if your child is really difficult to deal with – they have outbursts of rage and destroy things, they won’t sit quietly and do their homework, their teacher reports that they’re easily distracted and disruptive in class – you as their parent will be familiar enough with the typical diagnoses and may be advised to get them assessed. You get one of the common diagnoses, and then you can tell yourself that your child has something wrong with their brain, instead of confronting any inconvenient or messy emotional distress and its causes; instead of thinking, how might I or my partner be causing my child to act out in this way? What might my child be picking up from me or my relationship that is distressing them – for example, are you anxious/sad; or do you and your partner fight a lot? Because you, the parents, are the primary influence on your child’s brain development.

  The fact is, many people become parents before they are ready to do so; or they have children for the wrong reasons. For example, you may think it’s a good idea to have a baby in a bid to rescue a bad relationship. The trouble is, the parts of us that would drive this idea will only tend to achieve what they’re trying to avoid – namely that the baby will likely only result in one or both parents feeling more neglected by the other person and unfulfilled because, of course, babies require 24-hour care and attention. Or, there’s the idea that, if I don’t have a child who will look after me in old age? And frequently, that strong urge to have children is about trying to heal something within yourself: so I feel this hole in me, this terrible loneliness.. I know! I’ll have a baby, and that will fix it. For you, perhaps; for the baby, this only inflicts a terrible burden of responsibility for your parent’s happiness. 

Passing on our trauma

Many people have a child without really thinking through the seismic life change, without really considering if they have the emotional capacity or tools to be a good parent. It’s not that I think you shouldn’t become a parent if you have trauma – if that were the case, then our species would soon die out since most of us have trauma of some kind. But I think it’s incumbent on us to be aware of our wounds and how we may pass them on to future generations.. and do what we can to heal.

So, ideally, if you noticed your child showing difficulties, your first course of action would be to wonder what might be going wrong for them. You would realise they’re not behaving badly for no reason; rather, that they are showing signs of emotional distress perhaps in the only way they know how. You’d look first at your relationship with your child – what might be missing for them, eg, not enough attention from you?; or what might be too much for them, eg, too high expectations on them? Then you’d reflect on yourself: are you happy, leading a fulfilling life or are you struggling in some way that may be impacting on your child? Then maybe you can widen your reflection to the child’s siblings – eg, do you treat them differently? And then school or peers… what’s happening there? That’s a wide sphere of influence to look at before any consideration of an inherent biological issue – evidence of which has yet to be found.

Children need parents to be calm, consistent, warm, patient, attentive, strong – even when they are throwing tantrums, calling you names. And if you do sometimes lose it, because you are human, then they need you to make a repair.. to say sorry. This is the job of being a parent. It’s a child’s ‘job’ to just be a child. If that sounds like too much, then perhaps don’t have a child.