Like most children who live through abuse and neglect, I always blamed myself – but here’s how I learnt to break the generational cycle
The very worst thing that happened to us over the holidays was our toddler fathoming how to play Sia’s Santa is Coming for Us, on repeat. Excruciating pop aside, to be safe and warm and surrounded by love at home is a blessing we cherish.
From Ukraine to Israel and Gaza and Sudan to Southport, the levels of violence against children in 2024 were harrowing. Encroaching threats from unmanaged climate and technological change and democracy-busting populism, polarisation and post-truth are disorientating for parents too. We can fear we are bequeathing a less safe world to our children than the one we inherited.
I feel this uncertainty at home in New York, and in the British cities where I grew up – Birmingham and London – and all around the world, through my work with the UN. But, as I write in my new book: Trauma Proof: Healing, Attachment and the Science of Prevention, there is also reason for optimism.
One scientific breakthrough shows how we can dramatically improve children’s lives in a way previously impossible. Hidden in plain sight, child trauma is our costliest public health problem.
It is much more widespread than previously thought and transmitted across generations, often unintentionally and automatically. It is the major preventable cause of lifelong mental illness, addiction and violence and correlated with crime, poor health and learning outcomes. We are the first generation in history to understand how to prevent it.
Full disclosure, this is personal for me. The 1980s Birmingham children’s home I lived in between the ages of 12 to 16 was so violent that I closed my eyes to sleep at night expecting to be woken up with a punch. Without the primary attachment of a parent, I was the type of child whom gangs recruited, and predators exploited. I would run away and sleep on the streets. The streets felt safer than the place that was supposed to be my home.
[To read the rest of this article by Benjamin Perks, click here.]
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