Parenting With ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)
Parenting with ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) can be devastatingly hard for both the parent and the child. The Center for Youth Wellness in San Francisco has launched a new blog for parents who are parenting with ACEs as part of its StressHealth.org initiative.
But First – a Bit About ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences
Background
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) refers to traumatic or stressful events that happen to a child before their 18th birthday.
My latest book (2019) explains the connection between ACEs and developing a drinking problem or toxic stress consequences when coping with a loved one’s drinking.
They were identified in the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study conducted in the late 1990s. This Study involved 17,000 Kaiser patients who were asked to fill out a 10-question questionnaire. Their answers were compared to their medical histories.
The results showed that experiencing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were linked to a variety of health problems across a lifetime. These health problems included depression, substance abuse or addiction to alcohol or other drugs, obesity, diabetes, suicide attempts, heart disease, cancer, STDs, broken bones, smoking, and having a stroke. The more ACEs a person has the more likely they are to have or develop one or more of these health problems.
It’s not uncommon for parents, grandparents, and other family members to have these kinds of health problems, and then learn they also experienced ACEs as a child before the age of 18.
Brain research in the recent 10-15 years explains what it is about experiencing adverse childhood experiences that can cause health problems across a lifetime. It is toxic stress, which I explain below.
What Kinds of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Were Measured?
There are 10 types of adverse childhood experiences measured in the ACE Study.
Five are personal, meaning something done to the child. These include:
- physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse,
- physical neglect, and emotional neglect.
Five are related to other family members’ behaviors that affected the child. These include:
- a parent who abuses alcohol or other drugs or is addicted to alcohol or other drugs
- a mother (or step-mother) who’s a victim of domestic violence
- a family member in jail
- a family member diagnosed with a mental illness
- the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment.
There are many other kinds of adverse childhood experiences that were not measured in the ACE Study, but they have the same kinds of impacts on a child. These other ACEs include: racism, bullying, watching a sibling being abused, losing a caregiver (grandmother, step-mother, grandfather, etc.), homelessness, surviving and recovering from a severe accident, witnessing a father being abused by a mother, witnessing a grandmother abusing a father, involvement with the foster care system, and involvement with the juvenile justice system.
Toxic Stress and ACEs
As I wrote above, brain research in the recent 10-15 years explains what it is about experiencing adverse childhood experiences that can cause health problems across a lifetime. It is toxic stress.
Toxic stress happens when ACEs repeatedly trigger a child’s fight-or-flight stress response. It occurs when emotions associated with coping with ACEs, like anger, fear, frustration, shame, humiliation, anxiety, as examples, keep triggering the fight-or-flight stress response.
How Stress Affects the Body. Image source: https://adrenalfatigue.org/stress-and-your-health/got-stress/stress-affects-body/
This, in turn, changes how a child’s brain develops and how their brain and body works. It also causes a host of physical and emotional ailments, including: migraines, headaches, anxiety, depression, skin problems, stomach ailments, sleep problems, difficulty concentrating. And, it can cause a child to adopt reactionary coping skills related to “fight, flight, or freeze” that carry into adulthood. Because of these brain and body changes, a child may:
- often act out in anger – yelling, throwing things, fighting, saying mean/horrible things
- often get into trouble at school
- get labeled a behavioral problem
- get kicked out of school
- have trouble concentrating and learning
- be mistakenly diagnosed with ADHD, as examples.
These behaviors are not the “real” child. Nor do these behaviors make a child a “bad” kid, unworthy of being loved and respected. Rather these behaviors are the symptoms of what is going on in that child’s life.
Parenting With ACEs
When a parent experiences ACEs as a child but does not get the help they need to counter the impacts, they carry these ACEs-related toxic stress impacts into adulthood and parenthood.
ACEs Don’t Have to Rule – Resilience Conquers ACEs
Resilience is the way a person who has been (or is being) knocked down by ACEs comes back stronger than ever. Basically having resilience helps a person treat and/or prevent toxic stress. In other words, resilience helps a child (or adult) not let their ACEs “win.”
What Helps a Child Build Resilience?
This recent research shows that a caring, supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult can tremendously help a child build their resilience. It’s because that adult provides safe, stable, trusted and nurturing support. In addition to a parent or caregiver, that adult can be a grandparent, aunt or uncle, teacher, school administrator, or social worker, etc.
Other things that can help a child build resilience or learn ways to tamp down their toxic stress are:
- getting help to talk about and protect themselves from ACEs (by talking to that trusted, caring adult, for example)
- learning what are called “self-soothing” techniques, like mindfulness
- exploring whether their parents or grandparents experienced any ACEs. If they did, their parents or grandparents likely experienced toxic stress as children, themselves.
Which is where this new blog comes in.
What the New Blog Offers Parents Parenting With ACEs
It can help parents who are Parenting With ACEs find the help they need to reverse the ACEs impacts they experienced and help their children reverse theirs as well.
“The blog covers the special challenges of parenting with ACEs, but it also features short, lively, science-based stories to help parents, teachers, and anyone else still coping with their own childhood trauma and adversity,” writes Diana Hembree in her article announcing this new blog to the California ACEs Action Committee.
Each month the blog’s authors will roll out articles and stories that touch one of more of these interventions. Here’re a few of the titles so far:
- Why you shouldn’t give kids with ACEs a pass on chores
- The power of play
- Pets Rx: How a furry companion can help protect kids against stress
- Family meals falling by the wayside? Time for the Family Dinner Project
- Parenting with ACEs: Some tips for supporting your toddler
- 11 ways to help your child through a natural disaster
- Kids, trauma and sleep problems: What you can do
- Time to change your parenting playbook?
- Building resilience with Daniel Tiger
- Holiday blues, ACEs, and embracing gratitude
Here is the link to this new blog on StressHealth.org.
To Learn More
- about ACEs, the 10-Question ACEs Questionnaire and the ACE Study, search for: “ACEs Too High > “Got Your ACE Score?”
- about ACEs and Toxic Stress, search for: “Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University > ACEs and Toxic Stress: Frequently Asked Questions”
- about Resilience, search for: “Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University > Resilience”
- about support if Parenting With ACEs, search for ACEs Connection > Parenting With ACEs
- about ACEs and the Developing Brain, search for “ACEs Connection > The Developing Brain and ACEs.”
- and feel free to email me with further questions at lisaf@BreakingTheCycles.com.
Lisa Frederiksen
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