How generational traumas can affect children

 How might we be hindering our children from our own past generational trauma without realizing it? Everyone in one form or another has generational trauma. It could be from the way we cook, or the way we react to stress. Generational trauma can affect anyone we connect with. We can pass it on to our children or even influence our friends. Granted, not everything is a trauma. Even such things as traditions can impact our future.

Many people don’t know how they’re impacting their children, by keeping up with these generational things. For example, it is said that children whose parents go through divorce are likely to go through divorce because they don’t know any difference. They haven’t seen another way. Which in turn only shows their children that divorce is a “normal” thing.  This makes the cycle continue until someone decides to break it.  What children see is how they react to things, their learned behaviors. Like the good country song by Rodney Atkins “Watching You” our children watch us, and we don’t see how much we influence them. 

All families have those weird traditions with explicit or just learned behaviors. Now having good family traditions is something different. Those kinds of traditions are good, to tie us to our ancestors. Many families have many traditions, especially around the holidays. My family every year for Christmas. My grandpa reads the birth of Christ. This helps my cousins, and I remember that Christmas is about Christ and helping others, not about presents and trees and decorations. Another one of my favorite traditions is going camping with my family. We get to go fishing, dirt biking, and, of course, make s'mores. Traditions like these help us to grow closer together. We need this kind of unity if we are to survive the struggles that life throws at us.

However, what about our bad traditions, aka generational trauma? As I mentioned earlier, these can really mess our children up. Trauma is a way we cope, how we react. In short, it’s our flight or fight response, and we always remember how we felt at that moment in our life. We go back to feeling that trauma if we get into similar situations. We can pass these traumas down by the way we react to many things, and our children see it. It could also be how we treat our kids. That sounds harsh, but it’s true.  

  Some examples of this type of trauma could be things like divorce, violence in the home, or even debt. Like I mentioned earlier, divorce is a common one. Children don’t learn the skills of communication that they need for marriage when their parents get divorced. If children witness their parents or even just one parent being violent, they don’t learn to be patient or calm, they just think that being violent will solve all of their problems. If they continue down the same path that their parents took, it will only cause more children to do the same. 

The cool thing is that we all have agency. If we don’t know something, we can choose to learn. We can decide to better ourselves. With the Plan of Salvation, we need to have agency and choices, to figure things out for ourselves, to grow. It is very important for us to use our agency. Even though generational traumas are hard to overcome, and sometimes we don’t know that there is another way, we can decide to be better. 

I know that with this knowledge that we can grow and change, we can break the vicious cycles that our ancestors were in, we can make it, so we and our children don’t have to deal with it again.