Vol. 11, No. 2 • May 2007

What Parents Should Remember about Trauma

by Elizabeth Cassedy

It has been more than a year since I left my position as a foster home licensing worker with a North Carolina county department of social services. Since then I have been busy with my kids. I keep saying that I’ve learned more from parenting them than from all the schools I have attended or in my many “working” years.

One of the most important lessons that I have learned—and keep learning—is that trauma doesn’t disappear from your children’s lives as much as you would like. You can have the greatest therapist and you can be years into your adoption, but if you are parenting a child who has experienced trauma in the past, it will continue to rear its ugly head. This will happen during times of transition, changing grades, starting high school, leaving middle school, friends leaving, whatever. It will happen especially when you are feeling complacent, when you’re thinking, “Hey, this isn’t so bad. We’re doing a great job.”

It’s important that you recognize what is happening. If your child has PTSD, he or she might give you random signals that flashbacks are recurring. If your child hasn’t mentioned a particular person/situation for the past two years and then starts bringing the event up in everyday conversation, pay attention. The typical high schooler will have episodes of forgetting school work. If your child has always been diligent about grades and you see some major slipping, it’s time to evaluate what is going on.

What do you do when reactions to trauma come back into your children’s lives? You need to recognize the situation for what it is and then take action: talk to your therapist, make sure you are connected to your kid, keep talking, keep working on it. There is no magic fix. Work on teaching your kids to deal with the way their past can sometimes affect them. They need to learn the coping skills, they need to recognize that this can sweep them away. They need to deal with it.

When reactions to trauma come back into my children’s lives I remind myself of five magic words: “This is not about me.”

I call this my mantra. It is especially helpful to say this mantra to yourself when you are blindsided by your teenager’s disproportionate response to something mundane—for example, an innocent question about his or her homework. Oh, and another thing. When your kids are speaking or acting out of a reaction to long-ago trauma, always wait a few critical moments before you speak.

I have learned that trauma’s influence can mean that you must go back and parent your children as though they are the age when they were most affected by the trauma—for example, at times you might need to parent your 15-year-old as though he or she is an 8-year-old. You find that you must check homework as you would for an 8-year-old, look at assignments and make sure that they are written down, and use daily reminders about turning work in. These are the kinds of things you would typically do for your third grader, but your kid is in high school.

Trauma also can affect how your child learns. You may not discover this for years, as kids are skilled at making do, especially if they had to pretend that everything was OK when they were younger. The effects of trauma upon a child’s ability to learn can be remediated to some level, but they will always affect how your child learns. This is another life skill you have to teach—your kid needs to know how they learn and why, not as an excuse but so they will understand what they need to do to succeed in school and in life.

Elizabeth Cassedy is an adoptive parent and a former foster home licensing social worker.

Copyright � 2007 Jordan Institute for Families