Trauma is when a person is emotionally disturbed about a terrible event that happened in the past. There are things children experience in their childhood, such as violence, and they affect them till their adulthood. They get flashbacks of the event, and they cannot cope with it even when they are grown up. It affects their mental state, and this changes their lives forever as they cannot live as a normal child and have a happy life. It requires a lot of therapy sessions and emotional support to get over the trauma. In childhood, I believe parents should be held responsible if a child has trauma for the reasons below.
Parents are known as guardians, and their role is to guide children in the right direction in life by providing them with basic needs. It includes provision and protection. A child is just an innocent young person, and what he is exposed to at a young age is the parent’s responsibility. A parent should protect his child from anything that can affect him emotionally, physically, and spiritually because all these define who a person becomes (Mullally et al., 2022). Most children have suffered because their parents are no longer available in their lives, and it is depressing for them. A child only knows his parents to be his heroes; when they fail to be available, it becomes emotionally disturbing for them to understand the reasons.
Parents are to be held responsible for childhood trauma in their children when they cannot notice a difference in the mental state of their children. For instance, a child may be experiencing bullying in school, and when he tells the parent that he does not want to go to school, parents will assume the child does not want to get educated other than inquiring and listening keenly to their children (Harman et al., 2018). When there is a slight change in a child’s behavior, the parent should notice, and this can only happen if the parent is emotionally available to the child. Most of what children go through can be solved just by talking with them.
Children are very fragile beings, and they believe the world is what is portrayed to them. If, as a parent, you show them how beautiful the world is, that’s how they will view everything. When a parent becomes a best friend to their children, when they experience something unpleasant like sexual violence, they will always talk to them first, and you can tackle the issue before it escalates and ruins their lives (Harman et al., 2018). Parents tend to provide material things that children need but forget they need to be close to their children, to know them, and to be part of their lives. A parent needs to connect emotionally to their parents.
Everyone needs to feel loved and appreciated, and children need to feel the love from their parents. Sometimes, children may disagree with their parents but deserve a chance to be heard. It gives a child a sense of belonging when their opinion is considered. When a child is deprived of the feeling of love from their parents, it affects their mental state as they feel rejected in their own home (Mullally et al., 2022). They tend to feel like they no longer belong there, and their emotional state becomes unstable, where they can all feel the pain of rejection. They feel neglected, and some of them may end up engaging in immoral activities such as drugs while trying to validate their feeling and yield to negative peer pressure.
In conclusion, no matter how busy parents are with their children, they should always make time for them. They can have days that they can have some fun as they get to know why their children behave in the way that they do. A parent is always held responsible for their child’s bad and good decisions because children mostly emulate their parents. In a family where parents always fight, a child will grow up emotionally disturbed and, in some cases, they may never want to get married. It is very sad to expose children to trauma, yet it is something that can be avoided. Children are parents’ responsibility and are responsible for everything that happens to them.
References
Harman, J. J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D. A. (2018). Parental alienating behaviors: An unacknowledged form of family violence. Psychological bulletin, 144(12), 1275.
Mullally, S. L., Grafton-Clarke, D., Mawson, E. R., Unwin, M., Stapleton, M., Webber, K., … & Watson, S. (2022). Growing up unloved: the enduring consequence of childhood emotional neglect on the qualia of memory and imagination. medRxiv, 2022-04.
write