Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / Is Traumatizing Your Child Inevitable? | Thinking Out Loud
Transcript
- Kimberly: Is traumatizing your child inevitable? I'm gonna be direct. this phrase annoys me. The one I'm going to traumatize my kid. Every parent does. I understand what people usually mean when they say it. They mean I'm human. I'm gonna mess up. I can't be a perfect parent. my child is going to have to experience what affects them in ways I never intended. I do agree. I don't think good parenting means never hurting your child or a parent who has to respond perfectly every time or think every difficult childhood experience is trauma. Definitely don't think parents should live in terror of making mistakes. Doesn't really help anyone, honestly. Somewhere along the way I think nobody is perfect can become a slogan people hide behind. there's a difference between failing your child and missing the mark. between making a mistake and refusing to repair. between a painful moment that needs reflection and a pattern of harm that we keep excusing because, well, nobody's perfect. Maybe most importantly, there is a difference between saying I am going to make mistakes as a parent and saying the harm I caused my child is inevitable. So what are they going to do about it? those aren't the same statements. One leaves room for accountability and the other can become abandonment disguised as acceptance. I want to slow down and ask. when parents say I'm going to traumatize my child either way, what are we actually giving ourselves permission to do? Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me Kimberly. Before we get any further, quick note this podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and we explore life's great areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer framework to help you understand your relationships, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. Parents will lose patience. We will misunderstand our children. make decisions our children don't understand, say something poorly. We will have bad days and sometimes we'll be wrong. Sometimes our children will experience disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, grief, or conflict because of things we do, and that's part of being human. Where is the line? Where is the line between I had a moment where I missed the mark? I got a little overzealous. something happened inside of me and I responded to my child from a place that wasn't actually about them. I think there is a difference, a difference between an oopsies and a pattern. between making a mistake and repeatedly making our children responsible for the consequences of our inability to regulate ourselves. saying I lost my patience versus my child's behavior brought up my own trauma, my own fear, and my own big feelings. for a moment, I stopped treating them like a powerless child that they are. I treated them like the people who had harmed me. Those are very different experiences for children. One is a mistake. And the other is a moment where a history enters the relationship and our child ends up carrying the consequences. I'm saying it because I think this is where accountability begins. Repair begins. Owning it, understanding it. My child doesn't necessarily know mom is overwhelmed. Mom is having a trauma response. Mom is remembering what it felt like to have her autonomy ignored. Mom is terrified that if I don't stop this behavior right now, something bad is going to happen. My child may simply be experiencing Mom isn't safe right now. that's the part I want to take seriously. personally I don't want my children to ever meet the version of me that I had to become around people who taught me it was okay to systematically casually be cruel. I don't want my fear to become their cage when children are exploring the world. They're doing exactly what children are supposed to do. They're learning, testing boundaries. You know what? I don't even like the word testing boundaries. I want to rebrand it. They're learning where their limits are and where compromise begins. They're discovering what happens when they do something. My job isn't to make their exploration stop because their behavior is bringing up something painful inside of me. My job is to create guardrails, the limits, helping them see where they can wiggle. That's especially important when my own history taught me that a person's no or stop it could be ignored until they learned helplessness. I don't want to recreate that dynamic in my own children. the uncomfortable part, even when I don't intend to, my reactions still can impact my child. My child doesn't experience my intentions, they experience the relationship. If I have a meltdown, I could explain afterwards mommy was having a really hard time. That doesn't erase the fact that my child may have experienced my mom wasn't safe in that moment. That's why I have to repair. I'm responsible for the relationship I'm building with my child. Repair can't simply be I'm sorry. If the same thing keeps happening, eventually the apology becomes part of the pattern. The repair means I recognize what happens. I understand how it affects you. I take responsibility for my part. I'm going to work on something differently next time. If I don't change the behavior, I'm not repairing the pattern. I'm apologizing for it. Those are different things. This is where I think we have to be careful with the phrase, my child's feelings aren't my responsibility. I understand the healthy idea underneath the statement. I am not responsible for making my child happy all the time. I cannot prevent every disappointment. I cannot regulate every emotion for them all the time when they become adults. I cannot make every experience painless. Eventually my child has to learn to manage their own feelings. I agree with that. that is also my job to help them learn the skills to regulate themselves, meet them where they're at and help them build that muscle. It's very different from saying, I don't care how my behavior affects my child. I'm not going to sit there and put my child on the monkey bars when they have not built the muscles to do the monkey bars just for them to fall and hurt themselves. It's about teaching them that they are capable and then they can do hard things. if I'm building a relationship with my child, I have to ask, what am I teaching them about relationships? am I teaching them people who love you don't have to care about how they make you feel or am I teaching them people who truly care about you care about the impact they have on you even when they didn't intend to cause harm those are very different lessons. We already understand this in our own adult relationships. your friend isn't going to get everything right. Sometimes a joke is hilarious. sometimes that same exact joke hits Insecurities you didn't know you have because they missed the mark on timing. That doesn't automatically mean your friend is abusive. It means the joke didn't land. So you talk about it, communicate, learn something about each other, adjust, build trust. You can't walk up to a stranger and demand that they trust you before you've built a relationship with them. Trust develops through repeated experiences. Friendships work the same way. Your friends aren't supposed to get everything right. Neither is your partner. Your partner isn't supposed to be your therapist. They're not supposed to be your parent. They're not supposed to be your emotional punching bag. They're not supposed to be your entire support system. A healthy partner can be a sounding board, a cheerleader, a companion, a person who helps you have a reality check to your own thoughts. Someone who celebrates your wins. who sits with you when you're disappointed. who can say, I'm proud of you and I hope you're proud of you too. who can give you space to be your own person. who can challenge you when you're acting outside of your values. someone who can lovingly say You're better than this, not you're a bad person. Rather, the person you're being right now doesn't seem aligned with the person I know you wanted to be. That's a relationship. Parents are building the foundation for their children's understanding of relationships, which is why when I hear my child's feelings aren't my responsibility, I'm tempted to say, ma'am, sir, dragon, yes they are. Not because you're responsible for fixing every feeling your child has, because you're responsible for how you use your power in the relationship. There is a difference between your feelings are yours to learn how to manage, and your feelings are your problem, and I don't care how my behavior affects you. The first teaches emotional autonomy, the second can teach abandonment. I think that's an important distinction. Parenting is one of the relationships where the person with the most power has an enormous responsibility. To use that power carefully. That doesn't mean children get everything they want. That doesn't mean children never hear the word no. doesn't mean we never set boundaries or guardrails. It doesn't mean we protect them from every uncomfortable emotion. and it definitely doesn't mean we have to be perfect. I know. Shocker. A gasp. Judas. It means we're paying attention. We're asking ourselves. What am I teaching? What am I modeling? What happens when I get it wrong? What does my children learn about love from the way I respond to them when I hurt them? Maybe that's the real difference between missing the mark and failing our children. Missing the mark says I didn't do what I wanted to do. Failure says I recognize that I caused harm. Crickets, no, literally, that's it. That's all they say. Accountability asks what am I going to do with the information? We don't expect perfection from people we love. We expect a relationship. I want to expand on this idea. there's a difference between making a mistake and failing our children. I agree Failure is when you stop trying. We hear that when we're talking about dreams. We didn't fail because something didn't work. You failed when you decided you weren't going to try anymore. And I think there's something similar in parenting. Maybe we don't fail our children because we got something wrong. We fail them when we stop trying to make things right with them. And sometimes what we call I traumatize my kid might actually be I had a moment where I stopped trying. I was overwhelmed, I was dysregulated, I was scared, I was angry, I was exhausted, and for a moment I didn't respond to my child the way they needed me to. That's a mistake. That's a moment of stagnation. I also want to make room for something else. Sometimes parents don't have the capacity to immediately address the harm they're causing. And I don't think that automatically makes them a failure. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know. Sometimes you're surviving. Sometimes you're carrying your own trauma. Sometimes you're working three jobs. Sometimes you're dealing with an unsafe relationship. And sometimes you don't have the resources, support, knowledge, or capacity you wish you had. That doesn't mean the harm doesn't matter. It doesn't mean there isn't still an opportunity to repair. You can get help. You can learn. We can have conversations with our children. We can acknowledge what happens. We can help them process their experience instead of leaving them alone with them. I think there is a particular kind of grief when it comes to realizing it wasn't that I was too much. I was always enough. Where parents prioritize something else. Maybe they stayed in a marriage that was hurting everyone because leaving felt impossible. Maybe they prioritize a friendship over protecting their child. Maybe they prioritize work. Maybe they prioritize appearing like a good family. And maybe they were so desperate to get away from their responsibilities that their child learned, my needs are inconvenient. And that became a very painful belief for a child. I will never be enough for my parent. And that's not necessarily because the parent didn't love them. sometimes parents love their children deeply and still make choices that communicate something differently. that's why I think it becomes failing our children when we create harm and then refuse to examine it honestly, when we refuse to have the conversation, when we care more about protecting our identity as a good parent than we care about understanding what our child experienced. And sometimes being a good parent means being willing to say, I wasn't there for you the way I wish I could have been. Or I didn't understand what you needed from me or even I hurt you. Then asking, when am I doing differently now? I can relate we try our best. I think maybe we should start using that phrase in the present tense, not I did my best. As if our best is a finished product, rather I'm trying my best. Our best changes. And what I could do five years ago isn't necessarily what I could do now. What I know now isn't what I knew then. If I'm still learning, my responsibility is to let what I learned changed how I parent. What does I'm trying my best look like? sometimes it looks like changing the environment. maybe I realize my child is consistently melting down in a particular situation. And instead of repeatedly demanding that my child behave differently, I ask, what can I change about the environment? Maybe the light was too bright. There was too many transitions. I'm giving too many instructions at once. Bedtime has become a battle because I've created a routine that doesn't work for this particular child. I'm expecting a level of independence they're not ready for. Trying my best means I change the environment before I demand that my child change themselves. Sometimes it means respecting our own nervous system. Maybe I recognize I've reached my limit. I take a break before I explode. I ask for help. I lower the stimulation. I stop trying to accomplish the unnecessary thing. I recognize that I don't have to win arguments. I put space between what my child is doing and what my nervous system is telling me it means. Sometimes trying our best means finding a replacement behavior. For the behaviors we had modeled. You might be unpacking parenting If yelling isn't working, threatening doesn't work, and taking away everything isn't teaching the skill I actually want my child to learn. What am I going to do with all the things that I had growing up I want to understand what is the behavior communicating? What skill is missing? What can I teach them instead? Sometimes trying my best is much simpler and it sounds like I will not blame my child for my financial stress. They didn't create the bills. they don't need to carry my anxiety about money. Or I will not keep trusting my child with something they have repeatedly shown me they aren't ready to handle, and that's not punishment. That's adjusting my expectations to reality. Or even I will not let my feelings of needing to appear like a perfect parent determine how I speak to my child. Sometimes protecting the image of being a good parent. can become more important than actually being one. And sometimes trying our best means something even more uncomfortable. We need to focus on times we weren't perfect without making those moments our identity. I think hypervigilance can become its own form of harm. If all I ever see when I look at my children is what I did wrong, eventually I might stop seeing my relationships with my children at all. My child doesn't need me spending every waking moment auditing myself. They need to know I see you, I hear you, I'm listening, I'm interested in you, and I'm happy to be your mom. I enjoy being around you. They care whether I was present, they care whether I was kind. They care whether I was patient. They care whether I tried to understand them. And yes, They will remember the moments I got it wrong. I also want them to have thousands of experience that tell them my mom loves being my mom. If I spend all my energy looking at evidence that I'm failing my child, one, I'm just reliving my childhood. And two, I can become so afraid of doing something wrong, I forget to be present with them. I've had to confront that in my own parenting. I realize I have become So hyper-vigilant that being a mother that I forgot to be a human mother. Beep boop. I forgot that I didn't have to breastfeed my daughters to prove I was a good mom. I forgot that if my children struggle, that didn't automatically mean I had failed. I forgot that sometimes I was so good at seeing the problem that the problems were all I could see. That's exhausting. For me, becoming a better parent hasn't meant becoming more perfect. In some ways it meant becoming less obsessed with perfection. I'm more patient, I'm kinder to my children, I am more unbothered by people who are fixated on this is what makes you a good parent, Kimberly. I'm seeing my children as individual people. Not parenting checklists, not evidence that I'm doing motherhood correctly. People. People I enjoy. People I like. People I'm grateful to have in my life. Now I can ask What does this child need for me? Not what would make other people think I'm a good mother? The more I focus on everything I was doing wrong, the more motherhood started feeling like something I wanted to escape. I don't want that. I want a relationship with my daughters. I want to enjoy my girls. I want to be curious about who they're becoming. I want to know their personalities. their unexpected little interests, their jokes, their opinions. I want to watch them become people I couldn't predict. And that requires flexibility. It requires me to accept that my parenting journey is going to change as they change. Trying my best doesn't mean doing everything perfectly. It means being willing to learn, being willing to change. Being willing to repair and being willing to say that didn't work, then asking, what can I try instead? And maybe that's the difference. a mistake says I got something wrong. Failure says, I recognize that I caused harm. Yep, crickets. They might add blaming their child. for how they responded. my point is this. Now what? What am I going to learn? What am I going to change? What am I going to repair? What am I going to do differently next time? Our children do not need us to prove that we're perfect. They need us to keep showing up. I think this is why I don't like the phrase I'm going to traumatize my child because Of the way we say it, as if it's a fact of life. The crystal ball says, I have already decided you will be traumatized forever. That well, I'm a parent, therefore, at some point I'm going to traumatize my child. I want to pause there. What do we mean when we say trauma? Trauma isn't simply something bad happens, trauma is about what happened when an experience overwhelms a person's ability to cope, creates a lasting sense of threat or danger and can affect how they understand themselves, other people, or the world around them. Not every difficult experience is trauma, not every parental mistake becomes trauma. Not every time your child is disappointed, angry, embarrassed, frustrated, or upset means you have traumatized them. I think that's important. I don't think parents walking around terrified that every time their child cries, they have permanently damaged them. I also don't want us to take something as serious as trauma and turn it into a punchline. There is a difference between I'm going to make mistakes with my children and I'm going to traumatize my child. Why are we putting the second one on our parenting bingo card like it's inevitability. Why are we talking about traumatizing our children as if it's part of the deal of parenting? Why are we wanting to traumatize our children? I think that's weird, honestly. Apparently we're just casually planning our children's traumas now. I didn't know this was a thing. Okay, I didn't know. I was supposed to do that with my family planning, but I get it. I understand the sentiment. I think what people were trying to say is I'm not going to be perfect and I can get behind that. In fact, I think the healthier way to say it is I'm probably going to have things I need to apologize for. Because yes, I am. There are going to be moments and my child might look at me and say, You hurt me. Maybe one day they're going to say it more than once. I may have to sit there and nod my head and say, Yeah, I did. Not Well you were acting crazy. You made me yell. you need to understand how hard my life is, Maybe just yeah, I yelled. I scared you. I'm sorry. What can I do differently now? Sometimes the most healing thing we can give another person is an explanation. It's acknowledgement. Yes, I see that happened. Yes, I understand that hurt you. Yes, it mattered. Every child is going to need something different when they're processing difficult experiences. I think adults are the same way. At least from my own experience. one of the things that I wanted most wasn't necessarily for someone to explain why they did what they did. I could understand the logic. I could have compassion for days for what they were experiencing. I could understand That people have their own history, wounds, limitations. There are still parts of me that wanted someone simply to say, I know I hurt you. I care that I hurt you. I didn't need someone to tell me I was wrong for being hurt, that I was holding a grudge. Eventually, there were situations where understanding wasn't enough for me to remain physically close to the people involved. Again, I could understand it logically. I could have compassion emotionally and still recognize that being physically around them had become too painful and unsafe for me to carry. I walked away. That distance became necessary. And I think that's important because sometimes we talk about processing pain as if processing means eventually you won't care anymore. That's not necessarily what processing means. Sometimes in order for someone not to care anymore means to leave. Sometimes processing means I can understand what happens. I understand that it wasn't your fault, and I know what boundaries I need now. Sometimes healing looks like reconciliation, it can look like repair, look like a changed relationship, and it can look like distance. It's true with our children too. Our goal shouldn't be to create children who never experience pain. That's impossible. Our goal should be able to create relationships where pains can be spoken about, understood, and responded to. Because I don't want my children to learn. When someone hurts you, you have to get over it because they didn't mean to. I want them to learn. People can hurt each other without intending to. And when they do, we talk about it. We listen. We take responsibility. We repair when we can. We make different choices when we know better. That's a relational skill. I think that's one of the most important things we can teach our children. So no, I don't think we need to give our children a hallmark level childhood. I don't think every birthday needs to be magical. I don't think every family dinner needs to end with everyone holding hands. And I don't think we need matching PJs, homemade lunches, or Perfect vacations, a spotless house, unlimited patience, or some Instagram worthy childhood where nobody ever raised their voice. That's not real life. Our children are going to experience disappointment, rejection, have friendships that hurt, fall in love and have their heart broken, make mistakes. meet people who don't like them, make decisions we agree with, experience grief, experiencing things I can't protect them from. Maybe instead of asking, how do I make sure my child never experienced anything painful? We can ask what does it mean to treat my child's feelings like they matter? Not just in theory, in practice. Does it mean I let them do whatever they want? No. Does it mean they never hear no? No. Does it mean their feelings determine every decision I make? No. It might mean I say, I know you're disappointed and the answer is still no. It might mean you're angry with me. You can be angry with me. I'm still holding this boundary. And it might mean I don't agree with you, but I understand why you feel that way. And it might mean I was wrong. I'm sorry I scared you. You don't have to stop being upset just because I'm uncomfortable watching you be upset. And sometimes it might mean I need to step away for a few minutes because I'm getting overwhelmed. I'm coming back though. And give a timeline. that's what treating feelings like they matter actually looks like. Not letting feelings run the household. Not making our children responsible for our emotions. Not making ourselves responsible for eliminating theirs. Recognizing that feelings are a part of the relationship. And maybe that's what I want to change about this conversation. I don't want parents walking around thinking I'm going to traumatize my child anyway. I want us to be able to say, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm going to have moments where I miss the mark. There may be things my child remembers and I wish they didn't. There may be things I have to apologize for and then I'm going to keep trying. Because I don't think the goal of parenting is to raise children who can say my parent never hurt my feelings. I think the goal is to raise children who can say my parents cared when they hurt me. They listened, they learned, they changed. I was allowed to have feelings about what happened. I didn't have to pretend everything was okay. protect them from feeling like bad parents and that's a very different childhood maybe that's enough maybe we don't need to promise our children a childhood without pain maybe we need to promise them something more realistic when pain happens between us I won't make you carry it alone because I will make mistakes so will you we're human and I don't want to normalize harming each other I want to normalize repair. And I don't want to normalize emotional abandonment. I want to normalize connection. And I don't want to normalize you'll get over it. I want to normalize, tell me what happened. I don't want to raise children who believe they have to earn love by never being difficult. I want to raise children who know your feelings matter. You matter. even when my answer is no, you still matter. So Back to the question. Is traumatizing your child inevitable? No. Making mistakes is inevitable. Missing the mark is inevitable. there will be moments where we lose our patience, misunderstand our child, make the wrong choice, or realize afterwards that We handled something badly. I don't think we have to treat traumatizing our children as an inevitable part of parenting. Because there's a difference between making a mistake and refusing to examine the harm that caused it. There is a difference between saying I'm trying my best and using I did my best as a reason to stop learning. Your best isn't a finished product. It changes as we learn. It changes as our children grow. It changes as we understand ourselves better. Sometimes trying our best means changing the environment. Sometimes it means learning to regulate our nervous system. Sometimes it means finding a different behavior to replace the one that wasn't working. And sometimes it means apologizing. And sometimes it means sitting there while our child says, you hurt me. And resisting the urge to explain it away. Sometimes it means saying, Yeah, I did. I'm sorry. What can I do differently? Our children don't need hallmark childhood. They don't need parents who never make mistakes. They need relationships where their feelings are allowed to matter. Where they can tell us when something hurts. Where we can listen without making their pain an accusation against our identity as parents, where we can repair, where we can change, Where we don't have to carry the consequences of our mistakes alone. And maybe that's part of what I want us to remember. We don't have to raise children who never experience pain. We can raise children who know that when pain happens, you don't have to face it alone. What would change in our relationship with your child if you stop asking, am I a good parent? And you start asking, what is my child learning about relationships from me? And whether you leave a comment, send me a message, or simply sit with this question yourself, I hope this conversation stays with you. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Until next time, take care of yourself. And remember, You don't have to be a perfect parent. The goal should be though, being willing to listen, willing to repair, and willing to keep trying. I'll see you in the next episode.