Let Me Tell You a Story

Teenage girl with no sense of self worth, looking desperately for love, affection and acceptance ends up getting pregnant. Child is born. Parents fight all the time. Father and mother are physically and verbally abusive to each other. Baby cries because they feel unsafe and scared. The baby’s needs to be nurtured, held, fed and loved are not met. The abuse is turned toward the baby because it cries all the time and they want it to shut up. Father goes to prison, mother finds another man to make her feel loved. Young child gets sexually used by a “friend”. Child gets passed around to family members and friends when they start acting violent. Child is punished for bad behavior in school, behavior escalates, child drops out of school. Mother kicks child out when they becomes violent. Child lives on the streets finding occasional shelter from friends who lets them stay for awhile, but soon asks them to leave because of the their behavior.

Story Twists

The child finds one of the parents dead from an overdose.

The child witnesses a parent getting shot and killed by street violence.

The child is “hotlined” and the state takes custody.

Mother is the one who goes to prison.

Common Endings (or story continuation?)

The teenage child is in a county jail with no means of support, on a waiting list for a public defender, kept in jail for months or years even though they have not been convicted of a crime.

Teenage girl with no sense of self worth, looking desperately for love, affection and acceptance ends up getting pregnant…….

How can the Story Change?

The story can change by understanding it. The story can change with compassion. The story can change by looking for similarities to our own stories remembering how we felt as children, and not judging someone else for not being able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and moving on.

This story is a hard cycle for many families to get out of, it is a story of poverty, lack of understanding and lack of resources. It is a story that is true for way too many children in this country and especially in the state of Missouri. It is difficult if not impossible to get out of a cycle like this if all you ever know is violence and poverty. Violence and poverty become the norm!

For individuals to break these cycles they have to know there is a different way of living and they have to know what steps to take to make the change.

We now have understandings of how childhood trauma affects the brain development of children. Children who do not have their basic needs met get stuck in the fight, flight or freeze mode. They have difficulty learning how to think for themselves, they are confused about what people want them to do because the words and the actions of the adults around them do not match.

We as a adults expect children to do what we tell them to do even if our behavior is different then our words. To be able to teach these children they have to first feel safe, they have to develop trust in the adults around them. That cannot be done by yelling at them, punishing them with restraints or shaming them. All that type of behavior does is reinforce the feelings of fear which causes the behavior to escalate. We have to look beyond the behavior to the fear that is underlying it. We have to act the way we want the kids to act, we have to show them that we see them, hear them and love them just the way they are to help them want to be better, to want to trust and to want to believe there is a different way of living.