When Parents Are Traumatized by Their Children

Excellent and adequate parents naturally do their best to nurture and protect their children. Despite the best efforts of these parents, some children engage in behaviors that threaten their parents to such an extreme that it compromises the parent to parent. In some cases, parents are compromised to the extent that they cannot parent at all. When this occurs, targeted trauma-informed treatment may be necessary to restore parents to functionality.

Source: Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Children with moderate to severe mental illness sometimes behave in ways that traumatize their parents. This most often involves the child attempting to harm the parent directly or the child attempting to harm themselves.

Examples of Attempts to Hurt Parents Directly

• Physical Assault. This includes hitting the parent with fists or objects.
• Destruction of property. This includes destruction of items valuable to the parent as well as setting fire to the house, or even attacking a pet or setting it free.
• Character Assassination. This involves attacking the parents’ reputation. Examples include reporting the parent to the police for fabricated crimes and posting negative stories about the parent, or sending them to the parent’s employer.
• Verbal assault. This can include screaming at the parent relentlessly, berating the parent, or keeping the parent awake by yelling at the parent throughout the night.

Examples of Self-Harm That Are Often Traumatic to Parents

• Suicide attempts. This includes and is often associated with threats of suicide.
• Self-mutilation. Examples include cutting or burning themselves, starving themselves, and risky behaviors such as promiscuity and substance abuse.
• Self-sabotage. Examples are not going to school or work and sabotaging relationships.

Children who engage in these behaviors often threaten their parents that if they call an ambulance, try to take them to the emergency room, or force them to see a therapist, they will kill themselves. Parents are often disarmed by this threat and feel terrorized and terrified. This leaves parents feeling like they have no options, and they become unable to parent.

Parents sometimes experience combinations of these symptoms occurring frequently. When this happens, parents often become traumatized by the child’s behavior. Children who engage in these behaviors often blame their parents for provoking destructive acts (blame-shifting). The parents become increasingly afraid of triggering the child’s destructive behaviors, and they become paralyzed and powerless in their ability to parent. They become so fearful of the child’s behaviors that they are unable to set any limits or boundaries.

The child’s blame-shifting also causes the parent to feel guilty about the child’s discomfort and dysfunction. This adds to the parents’ inability to parent effectively and encourages them to give in whenever the child makes demands.

This often leads to a form of parental inversion where the child is in control of the family. The entire family ends up walking on eggshells. Common results of this include marital conflict, sometimes to the level that it causes divorce, as well as psychological symptoms. Parents in this situation may experience symptoms of traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety, depression, and somatic symptoms.

Parental trauma and parental inversion rarely resolve without intervention. If not addressed, it often continues into the child’s adulthood. When this occurs, these patterns become increasingly crystallized and harder to reverse.

Healing Parental Trauma

Healing from trauma requires that the traumatic behavior stop. While it is generally preferred to accomplish this without removing the child, it is difficult to accomplish. One way is to have a trained parenting coach available who can manage the traumatic behavior while the child is still in the home. This is best accomplished when the coach temporarily lives with the family. This is often difficult to find and expensive when it is available.

The other option is that the parents be separated from the child for some time until the parent regains the ability to parent effectively. A competent friend or family member who has the skills necessary to manage these disruptive behaviors effectively is a possibility, if available. Alternatively, it may be necessary to send the child to a program, such as wilderness therapy, or another temporary residential treatment facility.

A parent’s experience of their child committing, or threatening, violent or destructive acts against the parent or themselves is traumatizing on many levels and may require healing on many different levels. Examples include the threat of losing your child, being betrayed by your child, and the experience of your child living in misery. Complete healing can take a long time, or even a lifetime. The priority will be the restoration of parenting capacity. This involves re-empowering the parent to react effectively to the child’s threats and behaviors.

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Parenting a child who frequently engages in the types of behavior described above requires some specialized skills. The parent needs to learn to neutralize destructive behaviors, rather than avoiding the behaviors by walking on eggshells.

Many techniques can discourage destructive behaviors. This includes getting the child psychiatric care before they are triggered and keeping objects used for destructive purposes (sharp items, lighters) locked up. Parents can also learn tools for de-escalation. For example, the parent can explain what the consequences will be to a child who is about to commit a destructive act.

To restore parental functioning, the parents must also become confident in their ability to respond effectively to the child’s destructive behaviors. The destructive behaviors described above are not representative of normal child development and require emergency services. Serious threats of assault require the assistance of law enforcement or social services. Serious threats of self-destructive behavior require an emergency medical response. These services can be accessed by dialing 911 from any phone.

Healthy children do not traumatize their parents. If your child engages in destructive acts to the point that you have become ineffective as a parent, you must accept the fact that you and your child need help. Allowing the situation to continue because of fear of the child’s threats will make things worse. Effective help is out there.