Children Are Not Meant To Be Grief Bearers

The emotional weight that you’re carrying may not be yours.

The inheritance of grief is not scientific in nature. It is created by all the patterns and ways of being in the world that are passed down from mother to daughter and caregiver to child.

Growing up with a mother who was chronically depressed and challenged by mental illness made me believe that the world was sad and scary.

She had no filter for what was appropriate to share with a child or share in front of a child, or to expose a child to.

I knew the stories of her childhood trauma while I was still in elementary school.

A child that age does not have the capacity to verbalize or process their own trauma or stress, much less someone else’s.

That’s why play therapy is used for children, as it is understood that children process stress through themes of play. If children are not playing, they are not processing.

My mother took me on pro-life marches when I was still in a stroller, and I can remember the pictures of aborted babies being hoisted in the air. I didn’t even know how babies were made.

I was tricked into trading in my beloved Barbie dolls for a “new” doll that the church said was less secular and immoral and had a different body. My mom said it was the right thing to do. I didn’t like the new doll and never played with it. I missed my Barbies.

I wasn’t allowed to watch regular cartoons because they would somehow ruin my mind and morals, but seeing pictures of dead babies and hearing about a child being abused was okay.

Hearing story after story about how the world was horrible and unsafe and the subsequent emotional breakdowns that often followed with my mother, which I had no choice but to be present for until I was older, all reinforced the same things.

Truth and power were blindly externalized, and sovereign safety and choice were omitted.

I’m certain that similar patterns existed when my mother was a child and, in many ways, I wish I had an opportunity to know the person who was under all that conditioning.

Unresolved trauma and complicated grief in a mother or caregiver pass down patterns of normalizing consistent pain and sadness.

It trains a developing nervous system to create a fluctuating baseline of hyper-arousal and hypo-arousal, with no in-between resolution of safety or regulation.

An emotionally dysregulated mother creates a child that is often split between two extremes; either mimicking the emotional reactivity or becoming the one who learns how to balance another’s emotional waters, while completely ignoring their own.

Either side of that split later creates an adult whose comfort zone is grief; either pouring theirs onto everything around them or ignoring their own and carrying the responsibilities of the world’s grief.

Grief and sadness are a part of the shared human experience, but children learn emotional fluidity or rigidity through caregivers and the external world.

It causes developmental harm for children to be exposed to emotional volatility and grief provoking information where there is no space for integration or resolution, no matter if those experiences are with caregivers, media, or other things that are consumed.

They WILL carry it. They WILL inherit and embody ours and the world’s grief. Children are not meant to be our therapists or healers. WE are meant to be their guides, caretakers, and protectors. Our children are designed as tribal beings, with intricate systems that are meant to be developed through the wraparound of healthy community, not through learning to maladaptively cope with emotional extremes.

The mothers and those who carry our children must do the difficult and challenging work of healing and transformation so that our little ones do not have to carry the responsibility of our grief for us. They will experience their own life’s hardships; they are not accountable for ours.

This does not mean we cannot or should not share our experiences, but we must walk lightly and consider if they are old enough to emotionally and thoughtfully process the shadowed aspects of our world, and to be honest with ourselves about WHY we are sharing what we are sharing with them.

Our children and young people need our emotional maturity.

And if YOU were the child who was the bearer of grief and who carried a weight that was much too heavy for your tiny shoulders, it is okay for you to choose to set it down now.

The child within will thank you.