Trauma-Proofing Your Kids

Children by their very nature are both fragile and resilient at the same time. To help prevent or minimize both big and small traumas of childhood, it is important for the adults to be calm. When your kid falls off her bike and badly scrapes her knee, the best thing you can do as a parent is to be calm and nurturing, even if internally you are really worried about the vast amount of blood gushing from your daughter’s wounds and wondering if you need to rush her to the hospital.

Children are usually able to rebound from stressful events. As they begin to experience and triumph over life’s surprises and losses, they grow into more competent, resilient and vibrant people. Your job as a parent is to help foster these processes, even when your own fear or anger or other big emotions might dominate your response during an emergency. It is natural, of course for the adult to feel shocked and scared if something happens to your child. But your fear or anger can further frighten the child.  The best response you can have as a parent is to attend to your own feelings first. Allow time for your own bodily responses to settle before rushing in to attend to your child, either by scolding or anxiously running to their aid (unless the child is in actual danger). Many children say that after an accident, the fear on their parent’s face was scarier than falling off the bike in the first place.

Learning how to develop a calm adult presence happens through practice. Through attunement with your child, your calm centeredness will help calm your child. This is true at any time, not only in a crisis. Once we become more at home with our own feelings, especially in stressful situations, we become models for our children.

This post is adapted from the book Trauma-Proofing Your Kids, by Peter Levine and Maggie Kline