Parenting During and After Traumatic Events

Parenting is the activity of raising a child: teaching, guiding, and providing care. What are the particular issues when parenting in and following traumatic events? Such events are sudden, unanticipated, and potentially deadly experiences, often leaving lasting, troubling memories. Given this, when children experience traumatic events, they need their world to retain a sense of normalcy and their parents to be a stable, predictable part of that world. Parents may be able to serve as a source of comfort and strength, but effects of the traumatic event may make it difficult to parent effectively.

Parenting plays a foundational role for children and in their ability to respond to a trauma in a resilient fashion. Both during and after a traumatic event, children need help and guidance to process, understand, and attempt to incorporate traumatic experiences into their worldview. Children need someone who will listen to them—someone who will guide them as they work through their efforts to make sense of their experiences. They also need models of successful adaptation to the trauma and caregivers who provide them with a safe, secure sense of normalcy in what has become an abnormal world. Parenting a child can be a challenging task; in the face of a traumatic event, it can become overwhelming. Ideally, parents will be able to organize and safely structure their children's environment, help their children regulate their emotions, and be available to the children, both physically and psychologically. In addition, parents will model effective coping behavior and problem solving while inspiring hope; communicate with their children about any confusion, fears, or anxieties they might experience; and help children correct misconceptions while creating a trustworthy worldview.

The way that parents cope with the traumatic event and the way they respond to the child's behavior are critical to the child's response to a traumatic event. Research has shown that when parents can monitor their children, set limits, encourage skill development, work with the children to solve problems, and be positively involved, children are more likely to show resilience in the face of traumatic events.

The impact of trauma typically varies with the circumstances, including the type of traumatic event, whether it is human-made, natural, complex, proximal, or more distal, or the prior trauma experience of parents and/or children. How the traumatic event affects the family, whether it is a shared experience or experienced by either parent or child, with related assumptions of support, affects the parent-child relationship. In addition, the nature of additional simultaneous stressors, the mental and physical health of both children and parents, their capacity to adapt, and children's developmental stages all contribute to the situation.

Parents may feel powerless as their beliefs about being able to protect their children are confronted; they may feel anxiety about further traumatizing their children by behaving in a way that is detrimental to their children's well-being. The child may lose faith in the parent's ability to protect him or her. Additionally, children depend on their parents to provide a model for how to respond to new situations. Parents' own stress and/or grief response affects their availability to their children and may make parents less aware of how their behavior is affecting their children. Parents may also become overly protective and restrictive in their parenting, or their behavior may swing between controlling and permissive.

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