Parenting Traps: Generational Trauma

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Yesterday I had one of the parenting traps that I often speak about. There was moments where we parent to us, to our fears, to our needs instead of what is in the child's best interest. And this is one of the common ones that I experienced yesterday with this mom.

[00:00:12]It's about eating and the child's 3-years-old. The child's completely growing fine. Head, weight, length, everything is fine, developing normal, meeting all milestones. But this mom is so concerned about the child eating that even though the child's growing well, all metrics consistently over time, growing well, mom is encouraging the child to eat because she's so fearful that the child's going to starve. And that's how the fear is manifesting that you can't see the objective reality. You can't kind of drop back into yourself and say, "Okay, here's a child sending me cues that they're not hungry, but I'm still pushing food." This is called a parenting trap where we have something from our childhood, our own childhood, the parent's childhood, something happening from the parent's past, some trauma event that is being recreated when we have our kids. If the child starts to see that they can have control over mom, the child doesn't objectively or overtly recognize but they're not that hungry. They're They're growing fine. They're They don't need to to eat extra food, so they're kind of pushing back. But then they see mom's giving them attention. So that gives an element of control that now I can get attention, but it's not a healthy attention. It's not a healthy way to engage with mom, but mom's setting up this unhealthy dynamic with her allowing the child to control her through a vehicle that doesn't need to be used for control. And that vehicle happens to be food. And there's also concern with feeding disorders, especially with girls. This is adding on a second layer of concern that the fear can contribute to unintended complications in the child's development and in this case an unhealthy connection with mom where she's using unhealthy techniques to have bonding moments with mom and that will translate into problems with other relationships in her future. It's also contributing potentially an unhealthy relationship with food, and that's not something that we want to encourage. So, now it's mom's job to go and address her fear, so she doesn't bring that anxiety to her parenting relationship with her children. We're going to be challenged as parents about our fears, and every one of us are. That's why I call them parenting traps, and we all go through it, so it's never a judgement. It's just a humbleness and acknowledgement that we don't get to look at parenting as it's our time to take control. That's at least one layer of generational trauma.