Parent and Childby:  Julie Beem

Every day ATN gets calls and emails from parents struggling to find answers for their children’s behaviors.  These behaviors are the result of early, often chronic, trauma.  Whether the child has experienced abuse, neglect, painful medical procedures or witness violence, these Adverse Childhood Experiences alter the child’s social and emotional development.  They actually change his brain.

So what’s the solution?  “What can fix my child?” is often the question asked.  Early trauma, and the resultant attachment challenges are not easily “fixed” (as in cured), but out of all the therapies and interventions, the single most important catalyst for traumatized children is a therapeutic parent.  Understanding why your traumatized child responds the way he does is the first step.  Recognizing that his brain, because of trauma’s physiological impact, has developed differently is crucial.  Internalizing the tenets of Therapeutic Parenting enables us to use the various strategies and tools we get from our child’s therapist, reading books or talking with other parents.

ATN developed our Learning Center and specifically the Essential Conversations for Therapeutic Parents to focus on these tenets and help parents understand the “why”.   Grasping Therapeutic Parenting enables you to pick up any strategy or model for hurting children or children from hard places and figure out which tools apply when.

The tenets of Therapeutic Parenting are: