We had our first Parenting with ACEs Group chat a few weeks ago. The full chat transcript is saved online. The topic was talking about tough topics with kids. I can't not think about the tragic world news.
As we drove to school I asked my teen if she'd heard about the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert. We'd only been up for an hour. We hadn't been watching the news. But of course she had heard about it already. She learned about it on social media just as I had.
Sometimes, I can still forget it's not me who is sharing news with her. She's learning on her own and often from friends. It's still me though who is helping her put what she feels, hears, learns and experiences in context and that's not always easy. Here's a BBC story about talking to kids about terrorist attacks.
The talk we had with Beth O'Malley related more to ACEs, to interpersonal trauma, to developmental trauma in varied forms. Those can be challenging to discuss as well. For those who want highlights only and follow-up from our featured guest, Beth O'Malley, please find the following:
Beth O'Malley: Talking Tough Topics as Social Worker, Parent & Adoptee
How Lived Experience Can Be a Professional Asset
Sharing Our Questions, Issues & Experiences
How to Start Having Hard Conversations
How to Talk with Teens
ACEs as an AHA or Conversation Starter
Further Inquiry, Additional Articles & Request for Resources
Beth O'Malley: Talking Tough Topics as Social Worker, Parent & Adoptee
Beth O'Malley has decades of professional experience as a social worker in the Department of Children and Families in Boston, Massachusetts.
She is a national adoption expert and has tons of relevant lived experience as well. She was adopted from foster care as a kid and is an adoptive mother. All of what she has learned, studied and experienced shape her at work and at home.
Learning about ACEs is more recent for her. However, she knows lots about all the topics ACEs are about such as abuse, addiction, abandonment, neglect, having a parent who has been in jail, struggled with mental illness or been a victim of domestic violence, etc..
Those are topics she has helped kids live through, recover from and speak about.
She knows that ACEs are about trauma in childhoods, homes and in families as well as in schools, neighborhoods and the wider community. It's personal stuff that doesn't always get talked about. It's important stuff that shapes lives during and after adversity.
These topics are hard for adults to discuss with other adults. Discussing our own ACEs with our own children or about the ACEs of others with them - there's not a lot of books available on Amazon for all of that.
But Beth knows from professional and personal experiences that the cost of silence is high.
Not talking about trauma, loss and ACEs doesn't prevent anyone from feeling loss, grief and confusion. It usually just means a kid is left to sort through questions and feelings alone. It can make kids feel lonely, isolated, confused. It can make them feel invisible, not important or not known. It can make them feel shame.
Worse, she said, is how kids "fill in the blanks themselves" or end up blaming themselves "thinking they caused things and are therefore bad."
Silence isn't as protective as people think and just because topics are hard to talk about doesn't mean that it's not necessary and valuable to work through the process.
In addition, she said, it gives the message that parents are afraid or unable to cope or deal with certain subjects. For example, if her parents couldn't handle talking about adoption how could she, as a child, have expected them to handle her feelings about the subject?
How Lived Experience Can Be a Professional Asset
One of the amazing things about Beth is how she blended her personal and professional expertise to create tools to help social workers, parents and kids in care or transition - all at the same time.
She's practical and she has helped provide tools that make doing hard things easier. And unlike many who believe there must always be a firm boundary between what's personal and what's professional, Beth found a way to bring her personal and professional expertise to all parts of her life.
For example, she brought a social worker tool, the life book, which had been a tool used primarily for kids in foster care directly to adoptive, foster and kin care parents to use at home, on their own, with or without a therapist or social worker.
She knew that children who have been adopted, in multiple placements and separated from birth parents and siblings have many questions, thoughts and feelings. And, that often the adults in their lives didn't always know if or how to address them. She created something to facilitate that process. The tool, a book, is Adoption Lifebooks: Creating a Treasure for the Adopted Child. Though she learned about lifebooks at work, it's what she knew from her life that inspired her to bring lifebooks to parents to use with their kids.
Plus, she took her personal experiences as an adult adoptee who was in foster care as a kid, and used them to create lifebooks that were more sensitive, inclusive, conversational and kid-friendly. Two examples are My Foster Care Journey and For When I'm Famous.
In an article geared towards social workers, she writes:
Social workers are either putting out fires or “checking in” for the 9th time that year.Children in care often associate workers with birth family removal or foster home moves. Not much good news comes from the social worker (at least from the child's viewpoint). If you show up unexpected, something really bad must be going on.
In an article geared towards parent she writes:
Life Story work is as much a parenting task as doctor visits, reading bedtime stories and providing transportation. Just like answering the preschooler’s “why” for the 54th time, we need to help our children to make sense of their life before, during and after they leave their first family. How do we do this? First we must believe our kids do better in life by grappling out loud with the questions “Who Am I?” and “Why am I in this family?” than doing it alone. Second, we realize we can’t fix or take away their pain.
More recently, she has her own experience as an adoptive parent to draw from. She understands how hard it can be for parents to face, feel, think and talk about the trauma our children have lived with. She knows it's hard to talk to our children about what we have lived through or are still struggling to manage.
When Beth speaks about social workers, kids in foster care or adult adoptees and adoptive parents, she's speaking from experience. Always and in all ways. That can make her more relatable, credible and insightful. That's an asset.
Sharing Our Questions, Issues & Experiences
How do we get more comfortable speaking the ACEs that have happened to our kids, to us and in our families and homes - past or present?
Maybe we're treading water or barely staying afloat. Maybe things feel pretty o.k. now and we fear dredging up the past. Do we really need to talk about how hard the things maybe are or are have been?
Here are a few of the real situations people of concern to those on the chat:
- If and when and how to share about a family member's addiction
- If and when and how to share about past sexual abuse with children or grandchildren when the perpetrator is/was a family member.
- How and when to share about a parent's gender change not yet known by children.
- How to talk about recovery, therapy, relapse and recovery?
- How to give kids who have lived with chaos in the past more stability and security in the present?
- What if we avoided talking to our kids about our past, or theirs, thinking we're protecting them and now realize maybe it's time to share more?
- What if our kids find out about family secrets online or from other family members?
Beth. a professional social worker with plenty of experiencing having hard conversations admitted that these conversations can be hard for her to have a mother. When it was her ACEs or those of her husband or daughter, it was hard. We don't always want to think or talk about the pain we've lived through, with or even caused loved ones.
However, she reminded those on the chat that if we want our kids to be able to come to us with anything we have to show them that we are adept at handling hard words and feelings.
If we seem too afraid to discuss certain subjects how can we expect our kids to know if and how to do so? Or how to come to us when they struggle?
How to Start Having Hard Conversations
- Admit it's hard. Admit it's easier to avoid. That may be true but doesn't mean it's impossible or unnecessary to do.
- Remember and support yourself and other adults when they do talk about hard stuff. It is not easy, takes courage and can be something we celebrate.
- Get help and professional advice and support if need be.
- Use popular movies, songs and culture as a gateway to open up conversations and start talking about abuse, violence, addiction first in general ways before getting specific. Lay some foundation and do some groundwork so it won't feel so strained or random when it gets more personal.
- Remember that silence is costly, can cause pain and damage and that's why we work through the discomfort.
- It doesn't have to happen all at once. Talks can casual, happening on a car ride, or can be more formal sit downs. Hard topics can be revisited and discussed more than once and in different ways.
- If possible, start talking when kids are young, before they are teens, sharing general information and layering on, age appropriately, over time.
- Remember that our fear is in talking but the truth is the stuff we fear talking about is or has been lived already. It's not a surprise. Not really.
- Even kids who can't remember stuff or don't know about stuff have lived with feel the weight of silence or the "elephant in the room or family." And facts can help explain where symptoms of trauma come from. Often, sharing information provides relief and context and isn't as upsetting as we may fear.
Beth reminds people that kids can make up stories if left with a mystery history and that building a belief system founded on fiction benefits no one.
What to Do When Talking to Teens for the First Time
What happens when we haven't had the tough conversations with kids as toddlers or in grade school and now they are in their teens?
"Start where you are," Beth said. She believes it's better for communication to be open early and often so it's less jarring and shocking during the challenging time of adolescence but life doesn't always work like that. ACEs can happen while kids are teens and even when there's been recovery there can be relapse.
Conversations help people feel closer. In Beth's work, she reminds people that silence will get filled in by children with the stories they tell themselves about how and why things are the way they are. Those stories are often much more damaging than the actual lived truth we fear speaking about. We can't leave kids alone with heavy and hard stuff and expect them to manage well or better on their own. That's rarely the case.
She shared how she and her husband, both in recovery, talked to their daughter at age 11. She knew her Dad went to meetings and they finally explained why and started having celebrating sobriety and parties at their home and speaking of it as staying strong.
Some struggled about if and when to share details about incest with children and grandchildren when the perpetrator is a family member.
In a follow-up call I had with Beth she said some topics, like incest and sex addiction, have a lot of stigma and shame still in the culture and she's not as sure about how to address them.
I said, "How can you warn kids and keep them safe without scaring them, say, if one relative is creepy or dangerous?"
"In some circumstances, "she said, "a little fear is a good thing, "She explained that silence isn't what kids safe from danger. Sometimes, in fact, it's silence and not being warned of danger that puts them at greater risk.
For people who have lived with danger as children it is not always clear how to best keep children safe. These too are conversations she wishes more parents would have - no matter how awkward and hard they are.
She thinks it's great to involve a professional for guidance as well.
There's no sure fire answer for everything and everyone and some issues are sensitive. However, that doesn't mean the hard topics should be avoided all together.
While it's understandable that we want to avoid hard and difficult stuff, she said kids generally know more than we think they do. Or, they make up stories and explanations for the elephant in the room or house that are even more damaging than the truth.
Plus, as was pointed out a few times, there are sometimes genetics risks to ACEs that kids need to know about.
ACEs as an "Aha" or Conversation Starter
And for kids, talk about ACEs can be validating, empowering and bring relief just as it does for adults.
One person said, "ACEs info turned the lights on for me, before ACEs test, it was like stumbling in the dark for answers. I took it about 10 years ago, it has truly transformed my understanding of why we do what we do."
A health care provider asked how parents felt being asked about ACEs or learning about them? He knows some worry or fear broaching topics with parents.
All the parents on the chat said they were glad to learn about ACEs, appreciated being informed.
One said she think her healing would have gone better and sooner had she known and another was mad she'd not been told sooner.
Jane Stevens, ACEs Connection Network founder and publisher, shared quite 
specifically about one practice with the same concern has done.
Whether it comes to our personal lives or to a medical practice, sometimes it helps to have an idea of where or how to start. And sometimes, there's no roadmap and we have to just jump in and get started.
Sometimes, we think we must wait until we can do it perfectly, gracefully and without any emotion. But that's not always possible or even ideal. Emotional conversations be what creates closeness, healing and improved health.
Practicing not being silent is part of the process. Silence can breed shame and cause or increase pain. This doesn't mean we share "war stories" with our kids, Beth said or go into gory details (or ask them to). It means we acknowledge life events and trauma and the feelings and symptoms and complexity that result.
Some said, in fact, that the vocabulary of ACEs itself is a shame free way to open the door to hard conversations.
Talking about ACEs, Beth said, "helps to take away the stigma with mental health, addiction," and is "not judgmental," she said. "That's what I like" she said.
We often don't have solutions or for all questions, issues or situations. We don't need to though.
Sometimes the chat, the talking and getting the conversation going is the thing we need.
I am grateful to Beth for sharing her time and expertise with all of us. I'm glad we got to be together and to learn with and from each other and share some of what is on our minds and hearts.
For more of the actual chat conversation, and heartfelt sharing from those who attended, please see the full transcript.
To join the conversation now, even though the chat is over, please leave a comment or share a story.
Future Inquiry, Additional Articles & Request for Resources
Two policy level questions that didn't get addressed on the call are worth considering more. They were:
1)"What is one thing people could do to bring ACEs sciences to local child welfare or prevent further traumatizing kids?"
2)How are ACEs being infused into foster care systems and other sectors Like trauma-informed training of UBER drivers transporting foster children?
One question asked that I'm still thinking about, as a parent and Group Manager for Parenting with ACEs is this one:
That one might have to be asked again to future guests (listed at the very end). Please feel free to address it is here as well, in the comments.
Additional Articles
Here are some articles to review to get more input on talking to kids about specific topics or just to keep exploring your own thoughts and feelings.
- Abandonment
- Adoption http://www.emkpress.com/pdffiles/opendialogsw.pdf
- Domestic Violence http://www.breakthesilencedv.o...n-domestic-violence/
- Foster Care https://www.kidsmatterinc.org/...s-about-foster-care/
- Social Workers & Home Visits (Lifebook-related)
- Helping Kids Cope with Traumatic Stress 1
- Household Member in Prison http://www.familiesincrisis.or...to_tell_children.pdf
- Household Member with Mental Illness http://www.copmi.net.au/parent...about-mental-illness
- Household Member with Addiction
- Neglect/ Parenting a Child Who Has Experienced Abuse or Neglect
- How to Talk About Difficult Topics (General)
- Parenting as an Abuse Survivor http://www.themamabeareffect.o...g-as-a-survivor.html
- Secrets & Shame
- Talking to Your Child About Sexual (https://www.nsopw.gov/en-US/Education/TalkingChild)
Request for Resources & Sharing
Please share other articles you've found helpful. Blogs, book titles, stories and comments are helpful resources for other parents and/or professionals.
All types of experts and expertise are helpful. Let's have conversations and create some resources at the same time - together.
Thanks for your contributions and participation.
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