There are many types of trauma, and each has its own, specific effect on kids. While kids always respond to the initial crisis of trauma, trauma can also leave a more subtle, lasting effect. With adolescents, trauma can uniquely affect a teen’s development by interfering with their becoming an autonomous adult.
What kind of trauma are we talking about?
To become competent, independent adults, teens need to separate from parents. (For more on teen development, check out the posts, “The Key Way a Teen’s Brain Works,” and “The 4 Things Teens Really Want—and Need.”) Traumas that change the family dynamic—and especially the teen’s role within the family—tend to interfere with this need to separate. Traumas such as the death (or incapacity) of a parent or sibling, the parents’ divorce/breakup, or a parent’s acute mental health issues, can alter how a teen regards their responsibility to family members, and may jeopardize their feeling comfortable separating from parents.
In contrast, a trauma such as the death of the teen’s best friend, while being very painful, may not jeopardize the teen’s development. Yes, they will have to mourn their friend’s death, and the trauma itself may create specific narratives—for example, the teen may fear getting close to peers again—but it may not affect the teen’s need to separate and become a competent adult.
How trauma interferes with a teen’s need to separate
Any trauma that causes the teen to intensely need a parent—and vice versa: the parent needing the teen—may jeopardize the teen’s natural need to separate from the parent.
If a teen feels their parent is experiencing a trauma, or if the parent is compromised in some way—either through grief, mental health needs, substance abuse, etc.—the teen will not want to abandon the parent in their time of need. They will not feel comfortable acting out and pushing away their parent. It would be like kicking their parent when they’re already down.
If the parent’s needs are very high—or if the teen simply believes this to be the case—the teen will feel pressured to put the parent’s needs above their own, to “parent” their own parent. However, teens often feel they can’t do this job well enough: they don’t know how to care for an adult with adult needs, and at a time when feeling competent is so crucial to the teen, they will feel inadequate.
In the example above in which a teen loses a best friend, if the teen has outside resources—i.e., friends, teachers, mentors, etc.— who can help them process their loss, they won’t have to excessively rely on the parent. In this case, they can both mourn and be a teen who, at times, can safely reject their parent. If the teen only has a parent for a resource, their grief will likely cause them to regress, though once their grief is processed with the parent, they can return to being a teen, separating and rejecting their parent.
A specific look at divorce/breakup
Parental breakup can be intense, sad, and disregulating but it doesn’t have to become traumatic for a teen. It will be traumatic if the teen has to take on a parental role, rather than remain an adolescent. If a teen feels they must care for a parent’s emotional needs, if they take on the role of parental confidante, advisor, or close friend, then the teen can’t remain a teenager. They aren’t allowed to separate.
Sometimes, parents don’t ask the teen to play this role, but the teen imagines it’s needed. For instance, they may be aware of how painful the breakup is, and they may want to comfort, reassure, or take care of a parent. What matters here is the teen’s experience: do they believe they are needed in a parental role? If they do, then the breakup will stymy the teen’s natural need to separate.
What parents can do
- Examine the trauma. Does this type of trauma challenge your teen’s need to separate and be a competent individual from you?
- Name the emotions and family dynamic. Get what’s hidden into the open where you all can deal with what’s happening. If your teen feels they have to take care of you, voice this to the teen. Invite your teen to talk about how they feel, and what they imagine you need. Just listen at this point.
- Reassure your teen what you need—and the limits of what you expect. The key is to clarify that while you like support, your teen isn’t responsible for you. They can offer support when they want to give it. If the trauma has compromised you, let your teen know that you are getting outside help so that it’s not your teen’s problem.
- Take action for yourself. Follow through on what you said in #3, and let your teen know it. Find a therapist, seek help from friends, family, clergy, etc. Deal with your own, intense feelings separately from your teen so that they aren’t inadvertently invited to take on a parental role. You don’t have to hide your feelings; just control them while your teen is there.
- Get help for your teen, if needed. Trauma, by definition, overwhelms our ability to cope. If your teen is struggling with the aftermath of trauma, find them a therapist or someone who can help them express and deal with their feelings.
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