A Vision for Healing Parental Burnout

“Over time, I have come to understand that social transformation (the push for more just systems and policies) and personal transformation (healing our own trauma and reshaping our relationships) have to happen together. Not one or the other, but both.” - Prentis Hemphill, “What it takes to heal.”

I am reading about trauma and working on my second book addressing parenting trauma as a distinct experience of physical, psychological, and social pain that rips into the souls and lives of parents.

In Prentis Hemphill’s book on healing, they deliver an essential message: Healing is globally transformative, both for individuals and communities. And, Hemphill potently declares, if we want to enact justice in our distinctive histories and relationships, we must engage in acts of healing.

We cannot separate activism from healing. 

But as a culture, we have largely seen these two acts very differently. 

Activism takes place in the streets; in protests and movements and marches; in nonprofits and fundraising campaigns; in votes and in political organizing.

Healing work is an individual act for therapists, counselors, coaches, and pastors. It happens in 50 minute sessions, with white noise machines and copays and comfy couches and professional degrees.

My fear in stepping into writing and thinking about parenting trauma is that healing will be one more task for overwhelmed, exhausted parents to undertake when life is already way too much. It will be skewed toward the privileged and supported, those who have margin and community support to undertake this costly endeavor. It will yield healed individuals, maybe healed families, but leave our wider social systems untouched.

This type of healing would be so incredibly inadequate. It would be the equivalent of pulling a few drowning people out of the edges of the lake without asking who is throwing them in in the first place or what it would take to reach the people in the center, farthest from the safety of shore. It would create a few shinning success stories without changing the toxic vision of good parenthood that leaves so many to silently suffer. 

We’re not in need of healing because we just need to tweak our toolbox or patch up our support systems.  

We’re in need of healing because we have been abused and abandoned by our communities and our governments. 

We are traumatized parents because we live in a society that has swallowed ableism whole and believes disabled children are expendable. Our culture says that when our children can’t keep up with dominant expectations, bad, permissive parenting is to blame. Parental leave and paid medical leave assume a short-term caregiving reality, and offer little flexibility for the realities of long-term caregiving needs for disabled kids, teens, and adults. Only certain diagnoses are legal and acceptable to be given for children, and if you can’t get a diagnosis, you can’t get support. All resources are funneled through the school system, and if your kid can’t access them there, they get nothing. Parents are sent through endless rounds of meetings, handed off to different government agencies, and made to suffer on years-long waitlists. We leave messages and get no response, fill out endless redundant paperwork, only to be repeatedly told, “I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do.” 

If your child is autistic, ABA (which will repeatedly be called the “Gold Standard”) is the only way to get significant hours of hands-on support, despite the thousands of activists who have PTSD from their treatment and concerns voiced by professional organizations worldwide. If you are black or brown, you’re presumed to be a bad parent until you’re proven good, and if you reach out for help, you are more likely to get reported to the government child protection system than provided a supportive therapeutic plan. If your child is seriously suffering with thoughts or actions of self-harm, organizations repeatedly tell you they cannot help you and that you must “call emergency services,” despite the fact that police officers have no training in supporting suicidal children. If your child is aggressive when dysregulated, support services and even in-patient hospitalization are often off the table, with no providers who are trained in stabilizing and regulating without restraint or seclusion. Our kids are more likely to end up bound, over-medicated, or trapped alone than supported.

If you have not faced the real underbelly of the beast, this may sound like hyperbole. You don’t want to believe it. You think that it can’t be true. “It can’t be that bad. Amanda, you’re making it sound worse than it is. If we really needed help, it would be there for us. If things got really bad, someone would know what to do. Someone would step in.”

My dear friend, I understand why you want this to be true. This is a convenient, comforting lie that we have all been fed. I swallowed it too. I believed it, I wanted so badly to believe it — until the day that things broke for me. It has continued to be unmasked as the lie that it is as I began really listening to the voices of parents around the world who have come to my communities to share their stories. We are abandoned. There is no cavalry. No one is coming. If you are drowning in the open ocean, there is no helicopter dropping a ladder. No rescue team to pull you out. If you have a disabled child who cannot attend school anymore, if you can’t keep your job because you have to care for your child or teen every day and every night, if you can’t keep them safe from themselves anymore, if you are getting seriously hurt, if you are falling apart, shredding at the seams, if things get really, really bad for you, the dark reality is that you are all alone. We are all alone.

This is the ragged, awful truth.

Given this reality, true healing doesn’t only look like getting struggling parents into therapy, getting access to EMDR, a massage, or a nap. Healing needs training, government agencies, and dollars attached. Healing will transform our policies and politics.

As Hemphill says, “social transformation (the push for more just systems and policies) and personal transformation (healing our own trauma and reshaping our relationships) have to happen together. Not one or the other, but both.” (Emphasis mine)

What would it look like for us to move toward truly healing parenting trauma at its root, both personally and societally?

Here’s a vision:

Medical professionals are trained in your child’s profile and diagnosis and consistently bring you informed, targeted, and supportive care. Medications are diverse, accessible, and optional, with many ways to take them, whether your child can swallow pills or not. There’s a child protective services system that you trust is on your side, who do not threaten to take your kids away but instead do everything possible to empower and support you to be the incredible caregiver you know you are capable of being so your children can flourish. 

There is a simple 3 digit emergency number to access trust-worthy people who can de-escalate your terrified child in a meltdown (without a single firearm in sight) with needed compassion, humor, and targeted medications to help stabilize a critical situation. Struggling parents know that if they can no longer keep working because their child needs round-the-clock, hands-on care, there is a robust financial support system to keep them afloat. Fun-loving therapists who focus on safety and connection are funded by your government or insurance system to come to your home or school to support your child as they learn and grow at their own pace. Your painful, difficult parenting moments are seen, named, and acknowledged in your wider community without shame or blame, with established circles of support where you can share these awful moments in communal healing rituals. 

Schools are only one of the many ways that your child can grow and develop in a caring community, with a web of support that remains consistent when your child is no longer school-aged. Disabled children are cherished members of society who are essential to the flourishing of the community as a whole, with public spaces and community events proactively inclusive to make sure your child is able to join in, just as they are. 

Healing is activism.

Activism is healing.

In a truly just world, parenting pain doesn’t become trauma. 

It is not an individual parent’s job to heal their trauma; it is a community’s role to heal the wounds that led to the trauma in the first place. It is a society’s job to enfold its most vulnerable members in a web of support that matches the level of need.

This is not a pie-in-the-sky utopia but a community vision that is a direct result of actual policies, investments, decisions, and priorities that have direct impact on many of our lives.

We need healing and social change. 

“Not one or the other, but both.”