Children's Essential Needs with Dr. Gabor Maté
Children's Essential Needs with Dr. Gabor Maté
Trauma and Healing
In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on Trauma and Healing in a Toxic Culture with Dr. Gabor Maté, an episode of Authentic Parenting.
Hosted by Anna Seewald, this podcast is about breaking the cycle of generational trauma by doing your own work, connecting to your authentic self, so that you can raise children who won’t have to recover from their childhoods. She is joined by a renowned speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté who is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress, and childhood development.
Save time and read our notes on how our own traumas and stress can show up in our parenting.
Topics Covered in this Summary
How our Childhood Trauma Appears in our Parenting
The Impact of Parental Stress on Children
What Are Our Children’s Essential Needs?
Takeaway
How our Childhood Trauma Appears in our Parenting
Trauma feels like a complete loss of control in a situation that is terrifying and unsafe. Parents love their kids and are always trying to do their best but sometimes their best is limited by what trauma they carry.
Exposure to trauma in early childhood has the potential to affect a parent's capacity to care for their children, especially in times of need, and can also impact their children’s attachment style.
You may have feelings, memories, or situations that remind you of your trauma and you may avoid these by being uninvolved in your child's life or neglecting their feelings.
It’s important to examine the source of your discomfort. When you can understand your childhood trauma, you can better relate to your child and provide the nurture and stability they need.
The Impact of Parental Stress on Children
The key to raising healthy children is a nurturing home and community, because the more stressed parents are, the more developmental problems you will find in kids.
Parents' own anxiety and household stress are linked to their children's emotional problems, including behavior issues, aggression, anxiety, and depression.
In addition, parental stress doesn’t only affect children who are already born. It is directly transferable to children that are not born yet. In other words, being stressed while pregnant can have an impact on unborn children as well.
What Are Our Children’s Essential Needs?
Children have physical as well as emotional needs that are important for development. Dr. Maté explains that children have four essential needs, and these include having:
Strong attachment. Secure attachment relationship with the adult caregivers. Meaning the drive to be close to somebody, to be taken care of or to take care of the other.
Rest. It means that the child doesn't have to work to make the relationship work and doesn't have to meet the parents emotional needs.
Freedom and the capacity to experience all their emotions, whether it's rage, anger, grief.
Free spontaneous play. It means creative imaginative play where nothing is required. There's no winning, there's no losing. There's no purpose to the play other than interaction.
Dr. Maté also added that children have two deep, biological needs:
Attachment – connection with another person.
Authenticity – being connected with yourself and being able to act on it.
No child can survive without attachment, but they also have this need to expand all their feelings, which is called authenticity, that they have to be able to be themselves.
Takeaway
Trauma is not what happened to us, it's what happens inside us.
It is not the past that has to change or can change, but only our present relationship with ourselves.