Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder In Children: What Can Parents Do To Help Their Child Live With PTSD?

Trauma. 

The word means all sorts of different things to all sorts of different people, but many people will, ultimately, think of trauma as "things that should never have happened". Extraordinarily difficult and painful experiences like serious injury, witnessing someone's violent death, or sexual assault, aren't all that uncommon, but most of us place them squarely into the category of things that shouldn't be. 

Yet, trauma strikes children as well as adults. 

Right after a trauma

Everyone experiences some kind of distress after a trauma — and though that doesn't mean they will go on to develop PTSD, it is good to seek early intervention to help a child process what happened to them and to learn coping skills. Early intervention also means a better chance that your child will be accurately diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, should they develop it. Keep in mind that the diagnostic criteria for PTSD in young children are slightly different.

If you notice nightmares, distressing memories, hypervigilance, a quick startle response, and other behavioral changes that persist even a month after the trauma, please make an appointment with your family doctor or your child's pediatrician. 

Your role in helping your child heal from PTSD

A robust social support network — a group of loyal, supportive, and emotionally healthy friends and relatives to rely on — is one of the key factors that builds resilience in people who have lived through a trauma. In adults, that social support system helps develop already budding coping mechanisms. 

Guess who they are looking to as they figure out how to cope? That's right — you. 

If you already have a good set of coping mechanisms yourself — like talking to people who matter to you, facing your own emotions rather than trying to suppress them in various ways, journaling, and finding healthy distractions like keeping physically busy, you have a head start. If you have harmful coping mechanisms, like anger, substance abuse, or denial, that, too, will rub off on the way your child deals with trauma. 

What can you do to help your child recover from PTSD?

Like adults with post-traumatic stress disorder, children strongly benefit from talk therapy — and often need it to reach remission. So of course, get your child into therapy. Various kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, play therapy, and also eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) have shown useful in helping children who have lived through traumas. 

Also get therapy for yourself. Yes, therapy will benefit you if you lived through the trauma together with your child. It will also help, however, if you did not. The knowledge that your child lived through a trauma, and the process of helping them heal, are certainly stressful enough to warrant therapy. What's more, the psychologist you work with can help you build the skills you need to better support your child, too. 

Apart from these fairly obvious steps, however, research has also shown that your child with PTSD will have better emotional outcomes if:

• You are generally calm and in control of your emotions — offering your child a safe and secure place to process their trauma. Children with PTSD need, more than anything, to feel protected. 
• You are actively involved, and able and willing to listen to anything your child needs to discuss — even if it's hard for you. 
• You accept your child's emotions, even the difficult ones, and don't try to convince them not to feel them. It is normal to experience emotional pain in the aftermath of a trauma.
• You help your child find constructive outlets for their feelings, including doing fun things together. Not everything should be dominated by the trauma. 

Common mistakes parents make as they help their child heal from trauma 

While you can do plenty of things to help your child cope with their PTSD and, with time, even reach remission, parents can also do things that don't help, or even make the PTSD symptoms worse. These common mistakes include, research has shown:

• Being overprotective — in other words, a helicopter parent. This is a very understandable reaction, the urge to watch your child's every move, but children also need space to process their feelings on their own, without you emotionally and physically hovering over them.
• Being in denial, and encouraging the same from your child. Acting like nothing traumatic happened and being unwilling to listen to your child as they talk about their trauma fall into this category. 
• Especially if you also lived through a trauma at the same time as your child, you may be vulnerable to irritable and angry behavior that could really harm your child. Research among families who lived through hurricane Katrina showed that rates of corporal punishment (spanking) went up, for instance, and that this made it harder for children to recover from their traumas. Please seek help if you find anger taking over. It's not an uncommon symptom of PTSD, but it is one you need help with.
• Being stuck in a pessimism cycle yourself. If, following a trauma like an accident or natural disaster, you feel all hope is lost and life will never get better, your child will have a harder time recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder as well. We certainly understand why you might feel this way, but for yourself and for your child, you do need to speak with someone about it. 

A final word