This article covers a difficult and potentially triggering topic: childhood abuse. Please take care of yourself, use tools to stay in your window of tolerance, and seek help if needed.
In recent decades, our recognition and awareness of child abuse has risen. We now know that cases of child abuse are tragically common, with one in seven children in the United States experiencing abuse or neglect within the last year. This is actually likely an underrepresentation of the true number, since many cases go unreported—even more so in countries with higher stigma around the topic. Where children feel instability or a lack of social support, there is a greater risk of PTSD and long-term health consequences.
We shared in another article about the risks of abuse you can identify in your TCK. Here, we’ve pulled together five ways that you can support your TCK so that they feel safe and able to report abuse to you. Many of these approaches may also help safeguard your child and lower their risk of experiencing abuse in the first place.
1. Show Interest in Your Child’s Interests
Does your child enjoy a particular book series? Do they play a sport? Many relationships—friendships, partnerships, or family connections—are built on simply showing interest and care in each other, and your relationship with your child is no different. Instead of dismissing something that you find personally uninteresting, find a point of connection with them.
Dr. John Gottman, who popularized the term, “bids for connection,” defines it as an attempt “for attention, affirmation, affection, or any other positive connection.” Although it was developed with marriage relationships in mind, the idea of bids for connection is applicable to all kinds of relationships that we may want to maintain and grow. A bid could include:
“Look what I can do!”
“You’d never guess what happened at school…”
“Hey! Knock-knock…”
“I’m so tired and my feet hurt…”
Any number of other attempts to connect.
Consistently turning toward these bids shows that you care and strengthens the relationship. It may seem easier to dismiss your child’s bids or move on from them quickly, especially when you are busy or emotionally tired. But your child doesn’t require perfection—just consistency.
If you’re stuck, or your conversations seem to peter out, try using other-centered listening to show that you care about what your child is sharing. This type of listening, instead of connecting what someone says back to something that matters to us, asks what matters to them. Why is your TCK interested in this topic? What does it mean to them? What is their experience like for them? For example, ask them questions like:
What was that like?
How are you handling waiting for that test? Are you excited, nervous, worried?
That must have been hard.
2. Empathize with Their Struggles
Your child has lost a lot—family, belonging, opportunity, traditions—and dealt with changes that many others their age have not had to reckon with. They may have trouble knowing what they feel or how to express it. If you are able to connect with their emotions and experiences, helping them work through those emotions instead of bottling them up, you can both strengthen your relationship and provide your child with tools to be steady in the face of hard things. Having caregivers who provide emotional support is a protective factor against child abuse, perhaps partially because children are less vulnerable to adults with bad intentions manipulating them through false affection.
Avoid dismissing your child’s difficult or big emotions. Dismissal may look like:
When I was young, we dealt with worse things every day.
You’re a big kid. Figure it out.
Well, we have a lot to be grateful for. Why not just focus on that?
Okay, I get it. You miss your friends. But what about your new school?
Being able to process negative experiences well is critically important to help your TCK feel like you can handle the things they have gone through.
Remember: if your child has experienced harm or abuse, it may be tempting to minimize or dismiss that harm to avoid personal guilt. But dismissing and minimizing what your child tells you can be deeply damaging. It could tell them that they are not safe with you, that they will not be believed, or that what they experience is unimportant. Having their experience not taken seriously can and does re-traumatize survivors.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
3. Be a Consistent, Reliable Person for Your Child
Consistency at home may provide your child with more security and reduce the risk of abuse. Your TCK has experienced a lot of instability in their life, and they probably will continue to experience more. Being able to rely on their caregivers is enormously helpful.
To be reliable to your TCK, you have to take care of yourself. Many TCKs have expressed to me their desire for their parents to find the help and support that they need in order to be healthy, which can involve community support, therapy, and habits of rest.
When you are healthy and stable, you can be a support for your children. When they fear that you can’t handle or can’t do anything about what they are facing, they will hesitate to share with you. Children don’t want to feel like a burden their parents can’t handle.
4. Believe Your Child and Show Them You Value Their Perspective
Ask your child about their opinions, beliefs, and experiences—with open questions—-and listen to their responses. If they express dislikes or frustrations, resist the temptation to dismiss those emotions.
This can be as simple as valuing their opinion on a piece of media or a song. Think again of the “bids for connection.” Research on the topic found that strong relationships “turned toward each other 86% of the time.” In other words, showing interest in the other person and what they want to share with you strengthens your connection. It helps them understand that you care.
Why would your TCK feel safe enough to report abuse to you if you don’t care about them as a person, value their experience and perspective, and believe them when they say something bad happened to them? Neglect of any kind—emotional, physical, or otherwise—can place a child at greater risk for abusive adults to exploit their vulnerability.
Aubrey*, a friend who has experienced childhood neglect and trauma, told me, “When you are sharing abuse with your parents, you have to feel like you matter, that you are believed. . . . If I feel safe, if I feel valued, if I feel heard and believed, then sharing will in turn be a safe place.” It’s just that simple. If your TCK knows that they are safe with you and that you can protect them, they are more likely to tell you when they need protection.
Remember that likeable, valuable members of your community can still be abusers. In fact, abusers often cultivate these reputations as shields for their actions.
RAINN, the organization which operates the National Sexual Abuse Hotline, reports: “Abusers who use grooming tactics know that building a good reputation is the most effective way to avoid detection. . . . Abusers leverage ‘good person’ and ‘pillar of the community’ narratives to build trust, gain access to the victim, and clear the way to commit sexual abuse.”
Take reports seriously—especially reports coming from multiple sources.
5. Discuss Harm in Clear and Age-Appropriate Terms
Another barrier to reporting harm to adults is when that harm is taboo, secretive, or the child has no words to describe what has happened to them. Children may have a vague sense that something is wrong, but feel shame or fear about speaking about what happened. “Shame is a huge [barrier] when sharing your story,” Aubrey told me. “You almost always blame yourself.”
Abusers may tell children that they must keep their actions a secret, that it is normal behavior and there is nothing inappropriate in it, or that the child is wrong or shameful for what has been done to them. Other adults may reinforce these assumptions. Fostering that fear, ignorance, and shame in children gives abusers more power over them, because it keeps them from telling anyone who could help.
Speaking with your child in clear, age-appropriate language can give them the tools they need to report abuse. Your child is not required to obey an adult, even a trusted adult—in fact, around 90% of abuse toward children is perpetrated by someone known and trusted by the family. Remind your child that adults are not owed access to their body and that certain kinds of touch are inappropriate.
Moving Forward
Your TCK relies on you to keep them safe and help them grow. Many TCKs seem mature and adult-like before their time, but even a mature teenager is still a child. They need your support, your presence, and to feel that they will be safe and believed if something terrible does happen. With these tools in mind, I hope you can empower your child to report harm without shame or fear.
If you need support for your TCK or yourself, consider looking into our counseling services and meeting with a caring professional who is enabled to help you process your experiences well.
* Permission given to share story.
