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CHAPTER EIGHT
Parenting Well When You Haven’t Been Well Parented: Fourteen
Strategies to Help You Help Your Children
The following strategies will help you, as a parent, teacher, or mentor, to help
children and adolescents recover from the effects of childhood Chronic
Unpredictable Toxic Stress.
It is never too late to help your child and your family.
A good childhood or a bad childhood doesn’t hang on a single moment or
even a string of them. You can still make a change and intervene.
According to interpersonal neurobiologist Dan Siegel, MD, there is no such
thing as perfect parenting, or being a parent who does everything so wisely that
our child’s developing brain creates pristine neurobiological interconnections.
“Understanding alone cannot prevent disrupted connections from occurring,”
says Siegel. “Some will inevitably happen. The challenge we all share is to
embrace our humanity with humor and patience so that we can in turn relate to
our children with openness and kindness. To continually chastise ourselves for
our ‘errors’ with our children keeps us involved in our own emotional issues and
out of relationship with our children.”
We may not be able to protect children from all adversity and traumatic
experiences. You may not be the perfect parent in every second. But you can
nurture children and teens in ways that prevent chronic, unpredictable stress
from taking a long-term toll. As parents and caregivers, we have the ultimate
role in preventing and modulating the effect adversity has on our children.
Even when you haven’t been the parent you have wanted to be, says Siegel,
“It’s never too late.” The mind “is truly ‘plastic’—changeable through
experience—and it is possible at any age to move it toward greater health and
harmony.” Even when a parent is stressed, if things settle down, and you move
into a more relaxed state and develop a strong stable environment for your child
and yourself, that’s okay.
Recent studies bear this out. Even rats who inherited stress biomarker proteins
from their mothers didn’t retain those biomarkers when the stress in their lives
receded. Similarly, when a human parent suffers from a psychiatric condition,
but demonstrates good parenting skills, his or her children are no more likely to
develop the disease than children who have no genetic predisposition.
I have worried about this myself, since my own children, when they were very
young, watched me manage a life-threatening autoimmune illness. I was
hospitalized several times and was unable to see them, and I had monthlong
periods of being bedridden at home. I asked Deany Laliotis, a psychotherapist in
Washington, DC, who specializes in treating simple and complex traumatic
stress responses, if my kids would be irreparably harmed by their experiences.
Her words reassured me: “If you have come through that time together as a
family and your children felt secure in their attachment to you, and if a new calm
is now the family norm, the developing brain will make new, more positive
associations that will over time override the old negative associations.”
I hope that my kids will hold on to their newer memories of my hiking with
them, baking cakes, walking and talking on the beach, and having long nighttime
chats about life—and that these will replace their memories of pushing me in a
wheelchair when they were six and ten, or of my gray face as I lay in a hospital
bed. Memories of the mom who all but disappeared on them have, I hope, been
integrated with positive memories of the mom who was always devoted to them
and to their well-being.
Some of those more painful images and memories may not be gone, says
Laliotis, “but what matters for the kids is how you relate to them around their
experiences, and that even though life was traumatic earlier, it is stable now,
before the end of childhood.”
If you change how you behave, including how you react to life’s stressors,
you will start a new process of “childhood remembering.”
The human brain has the remarkable, biologically innate capacity to break
apart this early neural cement, to grow new neurons and new synaptic
connections. And the younger a child is, the easier it is for the brain to adapt,
which means we should help our kids as early as we can.
To improve your parenting, there is no more important step than learning to
manage your own reactivity. But as you set out to work on yourself, you can
take these small, simple steps to become more present, attuned, and empathetic
and to imbue your family life with the kind of calm that ensures your child
builds a balanced and healthy nervous system for life. You will give him or her
the best possible chance of having the lifelong good health you want for your
child.
The following fourteen tips on parenting, mentoring, and caregiving are meant
to be first steps in helping you with your own parenting behavior. They are by no
means all that’s needed. If the adversity your child is facing is outside your
control or beyond your self-control (because of your own or someone else’s
addiction, depression, or mental illness if there is physical or sexual abuse or
unmitigating emotional abuse), you must seek professional or legal help.
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