ACEs Recovery Toolkit Blog – Week Eight
Act like a big girl…
I cannot believe we only have two more sessions left…crazy how quick the time flies when you’re having fun. We had 9 parents attend this weeks’ session, which is great considering we only started with 11; retention has been amazing.
This week’s session was all about parenting and child development – so we started off with a little quiz to test parents pre-existing knowledge.
Parents took it upon themselves to get into teams and work together, given that friendships had now been formed. We worked through each question, and had a discussion around the answer, listening to any disagreement and reasons why.
Some disagreement was completely valid, as their answers were based on their childhoods, and the lives their children have lived before attending the programme.
We spoke about how living with ACE’s goes against the idea of “normal development”, with one parent stating she always felt that her childhood had been “snatched” from her, and always having to “act like a big girl”.
We were able to build on this comment by exploring age-related expectations, and how we feel as children when our parents have unrealistic expectations of us.
Parents stated that as children they would have to do the grocery shopping, cook and clean, take care of younger siblings, even though they were children themselves. The most poignant moment for me, was when one mother, called *Gemma, stated ‘I was just there to listen to all my parents’ problems’.
We spoke about how we would feel, as children, having these unrealistic expectations placed on us.
Responses were given such as, ‘being snappy’, ‘sleeping a lot’ ‘walking out’, ‘feeling sick’, ‘swearing/shouting’, ‘aggression’.
We were able to link this back to the Five F’s, and how having unrealistic expectations as children, puts us in a state of stress, and if we do not have supportive relationships to buffer this stress response (toxic stress), we can end up becoming aggressive/being snappy (fight), sleeping a lot/feeling sick (flight).
We spoke about ACE’s being a cycle, and how if we don’t raise parents’ awareness, the cycle of early adversity will continue.
Parents could identify certain things that they do with their children, that their parents once did with them. We spoke about whether it’s a good or bad thing to parent in the same way we were parented, and things that we would like our children to pass on to their children, and things we wouldn’t want to pass on.
We used the nurturing children wheel, and mapped out areas of their parenting that they were proud of, and areas that they knew they could build on, and seek further support. It was humbling to see that not one parent saw themselves as “perfect” and all had things they could work on, but equally, they were able to identify the things they were doing well and were proud of.
Homework for this week was to go away and do something nice with your child and use the ‘Children’s Activity Planner’ to document how you felt as a parent.
I still can’t believe next week is Session 9….
Read more about our ACES Recovery Toolkit here