Parents with PTSD: A Guide to Trauma-Informed Parenting

No matter if you are a parent, teacher, or mentor, if you are in a child’s life and you have experienced trauma, chances are you do not want to pass it on. This blog coaches you on how to navigate raising, mentoring, or leading children without letting your trauma “get on them” per se.

A Perfect Parent Does Not Exist

To address the initial confusion, it’s essential to understand that perfect parenting doesn’t exist. No parent has all the answers to ensure their child’s developing brain forms flawless connections. In addition, understanding and healing your trauma is not enough to stop disruptions in connections.

Some disruptions will inevitably occur. The common challenge we all face is to embrace our humanity with humor and patience, allowing us to connect with our children openly and kindly.

Constantly blaming ourselves for our mistakes with our children keeps us stuck in our emotional struggles and hinders our connection with them. We can’t shield children from all challenges and won’t always be perfect parents. However, we can still support children and teens in ways that prevent lasting harm from chronic stress.

As parents and caregivers, we play a crucial role in lessening the impact of challenges on our children. Even if you haven’t been the parent you hoped to be, it’s never too late. The mind is adaptable and can change through experiences, promoting greater health and harmony at any age.

Will My Issues Affect My Kids?

When a parent faces a mental health challenge but still shows good parenting skills, their children aren’t more likely to develop the condition than those without a genetic predisposition. According to Deany Laliotis, a Washington, DC psychotherapist, if a family addresses issues together, creates a sense of security for the children, and establishes a calm family environment, the developing brain can form new, positive connections that gradually replace old negative ones.

According to Laliotis, even if the difficult memories linger, what’s crucial for kids is how you engage with them regarding your/their tough experiences. Despite earlier trauma, what matters most is that life is now stable for them before childhood ends.

When you alter your behavior, including how you respond to life’s challenges, you initiate a fresh phase of “childhood remembering.” The human brain naturally can dismantle early neural patterns, forming new neurons and synaptic connections. The younger the child, the more adaptable the brain, underscoring the importance of assisting our kids as early as possible.

How To Improve Parenting Even Though You Have/Had No Example

To enhance your parenting, nothing is more crucial than controlling your own reactions. While working on yourself, take small, simple steps to be more present, tuned in, and empathetic. Infuse your family life with calm, ensuring your child develops a balanced and healthy nervous system for life. This gives them the best shot at lifelong good health.

Here are nine initial tips for parenting, mentoring, and caregiving to assist you with parenting behavior. Keep in mind these are just the starting point. If the challenges your child is dealing with are beyond your control or self-control—such as addiction, depression, mental illness, physical or sexual abuse, or severe emotional abuse—it’s crucial to seek professional or legal help.

9 Tips for Parenting, Mentoring, & Caregiving

1. Manage Your Own “Baggage” 

The greatest gift for your children is handling your own unresolved issues preventing them from affecting your children’s lives. In simple terms, as stated by interpersonal neurobiologist Dan Siegel: “Better parents make better kids.”

The key factor in assessing a child’s secure attachment is how well parents understand their childhood experiences. Taking care of yourself is essential to be a good parent to your child.

By handling your own issues and becoming less reactive, you’re taking the most crucial step to improve and rectify the inevitable mistakes that all parents make. This marks the beginning of a positive change.

Parental regulation, or managing your reactivity to be more responsive to your child’s needs, is crucial. The better you become at regulating your behavior as a parent, the more effectively you can provide your kids with the safety they need.

2. Don’t Confuse Chronic Unpredictable Toxic Stress with Childhood Challenges that Foster Resilience  

The best way to nurture a child into a brave, kind, resilient, and curious adult is to minimize chronic, unpredictable stress during their early years. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between adversity that harms and adversity that helps prepare children to face the world’s challenges.

Finding the right balance involves both protecting and gently pushing our kids, as outlined by Paul Tough in his book “How Children Succeed.” While we aim to shield them, it’s equally important to offer discipline, rules, and limits. Every child benefits from encountering some child-sized challenges, an opportunity to stumble and rise independently without immediate assistance.

According to Tough, the ongoing challenge for parents is the conflict between wanting to give our children everything and shield them from all harm while understanding that for real success, we must allow them to experience failure. More precisely, we should assist them in learning how to handle failure.

The most effective approach is to offer support while encouraging independence—creating a secure base while promoting exploration. While safeguarding your children, they need to learn how to navigate challenges, cope with difficulties, and handle setbacks and losses. A bit of grit is valuable for their growth.

How To Recognize the Difference
If your child has trouble with chores, homework, or sibling conflicts, you can offer guidance without doing the task or solving the issue. For example, if the counselor calls out your child for constant tardiness due to waking up late and then tells him they will fail if they have one more tardiness, your child must face the consequences and learn from the experience.

He needs to try to wake up on time and catch the bus. This might involve going to bed earlier and adjusting his morning routine. These adjustments build essential problem-solving skills. It’s not helpful to simply solve his tardiness issue for him.

Doing so prevents your child from learning how to speak up for themselves, handle minor challenges, discover their own sense of competence, and bounce back from failures.

When your child brings you a problem that you believe they can solve, instead of solving it for them, you can say, “It seems like you have a challenge. I trust you can handle it. What options are you considering?”

Adversity itself isn’t the issue; it’s a natural part of life. Failure and challenges are how we learn. Let your child develop competence by solving their own age-appropriate problems.

While a bit of failure and resilience is beneficial, if your child is dealing with serious issues like bullying, learning disabilities, emotional health problems, or risky behaviors, it’s your role as a parent to intervene. When trusted adults contribute to the adversity, we become our child’s source of stress.

Consistent and harmful childhood adversity doesn’t build resilience in our kids; it harms their bodies and brains, impacting their lifelong well-being. It doesn’t make them stronger; instead, it weakens the systems supporting their physical and emotional strength.

3. Instill the Four S’s in Your Children  

Let your child be seen, safe, soothed, and secure. Here is what that means:

Seen: Helping our kids feel seen involves deeply understanding and empathizing with who they are. When your child feels heard and understood, it strengthens their attachment and promotes resilience.

Safe: Steer clear of actions, reactions, or responses that scare or harm your children.

Soothed: Assist your children in handling tough emotions and fears. When they face stress or fear, provide them a safe haven with open arms – be their comfort.

Secure: Ensure your children feel safe in the world to help them cultivate an internalized sense of well-being.

4. Look into Your Child’s Eyes  

When infants lock eyes with a parent or caregiver, it’s a safety-seeking reflex that assures them of their security. Eye contact is crucial in mitigating the effects of adversity and trauma.

We can be a calming presence by using what Stephen W. Porges, PhD, calls “social engagement behaviors,” such as looking into our child’s eyes with a profound sense of connection.

Eye contact stimulates the vagus nerve, a vital neural circuit communicating with the brain, heart, and face, regulating heart rate, breath, and facial expressions. Boosting a child’s vagus nerve activity has a calming effect on the heart and lungs, soothing the body’s stress axis and turning off the stress response.

If your child is dealing with a tough situation, you can support them with a simple action: pause, face them, look into their eyes, express kindness with your facial muscles, and speak in a soothing tone.

You could say, “Let me pause what I’m doing to give you my full attention,” or “I’m eager to listen.” This simple act of looking eye-to-eye with your child helps them move out of fear, making them feel acknowledged and secure.

5. If You Lose It, Apologize—Right Away  

If you make a mistake, it’s important to fix it. After taking a moment to calm yourself, return to a centered state and apologize promptly. According to Siegel, you might say, “I lost my cool, and I can see it scared you. I’m sorry.” Or, “I messed up, and I scared you. I regret that. I’m sorry.”

When you acknowledge your mistake, your child’s fear center in the brain—the amygdala—settles down. Recent research on memory and adversity shows that the sooner we step in, apologize, and make amends, the less likely an unpleasant or scary memory will linger.

If you’re too upset to speak to your child calmly, wait at least ninety seconds. In this time, emotions rise and fall like waves. It only takes ninety seconds to shift out of a mood, even anger. If necessary, take those ninety seconds—about fifteen deep breaths—before apologizing to and comforting your child. This helps you regain balance and assures them of safety.

Apologizing for not meeting your parenting goals doesn’t make you less in your children’s eyes. Instead, it builds credibility and trust. You can use this as a chance to start a new conversation, explaining to your child what happened why you reacted that way, and expressing your desire to do better.

 6. Validate and Normalize All of Your Child’s Emotions  

Even if you didn’t behave perfectly, once you admit your mistake, don’t dwell on it. Getting caught up in your own story doesn’t really benefit your child.

Shift to acknowledging and normalizing all of your child’s feelings. Don’t dismiss or sugarcoat her emotions. Let her express herself, even if she’s upset or angry with you. You can say, “I hear you,” “That’s very frustrating,” or “That sounds hard.”

If your child opens up about tough feelings, instead of giving comments or judgments, just say, “Tell me more about that?” or repeat their words back, like, “Let me make sure I understand… You feel ____ about ____.”

Providing comfort doesn’t mean avoiding limits. You can convey two messages at once—acknowledging your child’s emotions while setting boundaries on their behavior. This lets kids feel understood while understanding they are responsible for their actions.

They shouldn’t come home late, throw things when angry, scream, or ignore your check-in requests. If you react strongly due to a rule violation, step back, admit your regret, apologize, offer a hug, and ensure they understand the behavior that led to your reaction.

You could say, for instance, “This must be tough. It’s challenging when things don’t go your way. Remember, our rule is you can’t stay out past your curfew, and these are the consequences. You can apologize and still stick to the rules.”

7. Amplify the Good Feelings 

We’re naturally inclined to worry due to evolution. Our ancestors were anxious to stay vigilant against predators, passing on this genetic tendency for anxiety. Worrying has been a survival trait for our species.

We must assist our children—and ourselves—in balancing stressful moments, interactions, and challenges with a sense of wonder and goodness. Encouraging our kids to find and appreciate the positive is essential.

For example, after comforting your toddler when she reports being called a bad name on the playground, you could add, “Wow, you handled that so well. That must have been scary, and you did the right thing by telling me.” Or, if you pick up your son from preschool and he’s crying because he missed you, you might say, “We’re together now, and it feels nice, doesn’t it?”

Look for general moments in the day to highlight positive experiences, paying attention to the good things.  

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD, emphasizes the need to acknowledge positive experiences in our daily lives. By doing so, we can transform them into inner strengths like gratitude, compassion, resilience, and self-worth, counteracting our brain’s natural inclination to focus on the negative.

According to researcher John Gottman, MD, PhD, it usually takes five positive interactions to compensate for a single negative one in any relationship. This is because our minds tend to remember painful experiences more than pleasant ones. The brain acts like Velcro for negative experiences but like Teflon for positive ones.

A parenting goal is intentionally to “take in the good.” By guiding your kids to do this, the positive emotional impact of good experiences gradually enhances their outlook. This process helps balance their perspective, enabling the formation of new, positive neural structures in their brains. This, in turn, better equips them to handle challenges with a broader perspective over time.

An easy way to do this is to look for good facts and turn them into good experiences.

Whether it’s a deer, a bird, a bunny hopping by, or a beautiful sunset, pause with your child. Discuss the beauty of the moment together, sharing the colors you see, the sounds you hear and appreciating the pleasantness of the moment. Holding that feeling for thirty seconds will increase its encoding in the brain.

Before your child falls asleep, reflect on the happy and joyful moments from the day. Encourage them to feel these positive experiences sinking in, like a warm glow spreading through their chest.

As a parent, be sure to embrace the positive moments you notice—like people being kind at the grocery store, the scent of your child’s hair, completing tasks at work, finishing the dishes, and maintaining patience when tired.

8. Stop, Look, Go  

Encourage your kids to adopt the “stop, look, and go” method—it’s a straightforward way to appreciate and be grateful for the good things. Despite its simplicity, how often do we actually stop in our fast-paced lives? Take the time to pause, and don’t miss the chance to appreciate the good around you.

This means we need to build stop signs into our lives. No matter where you are, taking a moment to stop, look, and appreciate the beauty around you—whether it’s the birds singing, clouds moving across the sky, or the warmth of someone in your arms—increases your sense of gratitude before moving on to the next task.

When you experience gratitude, you also feel a deeper sense of happiness and joy—a powerful remedy for stress. By encouraging your kids (and yourself) to actively “stop and look” for beauty, signs of care from others, or positive qualities within, and by savoring those good feelings before moving on to the next task, you help counter the impact of both yours and potentially their childhood trauma.

9. Give a Name to Difficult Emotions  

Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, discovered that naming your emotions activates brain areas that reduce reactive responses. If you guide your children to verbalize what they’re feeling—for example, saying, “I’m feeling angry and afraid right now”—their brain’s alarm response diminishes significantly.

The more you encourage your children to use the part of the brain that names feelings, the less stressed they’ll be, even in challenging situations. In simple terms, as Dan Siegel, MD, puts it: “Name it to tame it.” If your child struggles to name what they’re feeling, provide options—ask, “Are you feeling mad, sad, or afraid?”

You could write down the question with multiple-choice answers. Alternatively, start the conversation by empathizing with their emotions: “What happened was really scary. Are you feeling scared?”

Guide your children in naming their emotions before emotions take over. Emphasize that the issue isn’t feeling anxious, fearful, or angry; it’s about how they respond when overwhelmed. By assisting them in identifying and naming difficult feelings, you prevent acting out, feeling overwhelmed, or shutting down.