What Children Don’t Know… Hurts Them

By Karen Glistrup, family therapist MPF and author
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Children are always involved in what is going on around them… Including what is not being talked about. A few decades ago, it was widely believed that children should be shielded from difficult aspects of life such as illness and death. Today, we know that children at a very early age are far more perceptive and affected by these things than we often realise. They experience worry and are curious, they need our help to understand what is happening around them. Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges is one that it is still very rooted in society. We tell ourselves: “It’s best that the children don’t know”, or, “We want to protect our children. They’re too young to understand.”

But please listen! And help to spread this important message: Avoiding a topic that is part of a child’s life is never good for the children, who are trying to understand themselves and make sense of their world.

Children have need of clear, empathetic communication about what is going on in their lives. This is especially true when it involves their families.

When we don’t talk about the realities, children start to create their own stories that are often filled with uncertainty, discomfort, loneliness, shame and a feeling of being wrong. Unfortunately, some of these coping strategies are often misinterpreted as something being wrong with the child. Or the children are just not seen because they hide the pain… just like their parents do.

With courage and empathy, you can facilitate a heartwarming meeting between parents and children. My work with these taboo breaking family conversations originated within a psychiatric institution. As a social worker, in my younger years, I worked with vulnerable children and families with social problems and difficult life circumstances. In the late 90s, I got a job in adult psychiatry, in Denmark. It was here, in a psychiatric hospital, that my work with taboo-breaking family conversations started. At that time, psychiatry did not consider the children of the psychiatric patients. Children were the responsibility of the local council, but very often they did not know about the patients’ children’s life circumstances, and the families were not offered help on how to talk about their illness and tackle the situation.

I saw that precisely here, where the sick father or mother were receiving treatment and were comfortable in contact with us, that we could meet the children and support the parents in talking to them about the reality they were experiencing together. I had the opportunity to experiment with offering parent and family conversations for the patients who had children. The aim of the conversations was for the children to feel met and seen and to receive help in understanding why their mother or father had changed so much. At the same time, it was my hope to be able to strengthen the contact between children and parents. The effort made sense. Both the parents and children found the conversations helpful, and many patients felt better. Psychiatry in the rest of the country was inspired, and today psychiatry in all regions of Denmark offer family conversations. An effort that has helped many children out of the shadows and strengthened the family’s ability to communicate and support each other.

Through the adults’ being present in these conversations, the children feel seen. They are helped to create meaning and coherence in what is changed and feels unsafe, and they are helped to understand that the parent’s pain is not their fault.

While this is a very different context, there are situations that may arise with children and families in your kindergarten. Parents may not want to share challenges with children, they may feel they are too young to understand. But I encourage you to speak to parents and encourage them to talk to their children in an age-appropriate way. Children notice more than we often give credit for and they will appreciate knowing what is happening and understanding how the adults in their lives are addressing these situations.

In the desire to share my experiences, I wrote the book ‘What Children Don’t Know… Hurts Them’. This is a book that guides and inspires professionals and parents alike to enter conversations that create a new relationship between children and parents, characterised by trust.

The trust-based and meaningful collaboration with parents regarding talking to their children can be used in our encounters with any child experiencing distress or life challenges.

It made me very happy to see so many similarities in the Laura Lundy Model which was presented to me by Bez Martin when she visited Denmark in 2024.

Unfortunately, in Denmark, efforts for children in distress have become increasingly individual-focused. There is a sharp increase in an individualized and diagnostic approach when a child shows signs of distress. Although we know the importance of relationships for wellbeing and although we know that parental problems can affect children, the focus is rarely directed at the wellbeing of the family/parents or at the relationship between children and parents and the reality they share.

Many children are struggling inside, and they may feel that they are a little ‘wrong’, which is why few children feel comfortable with too much attention. An individual child interview can, despite the best intentions, trigger an increased sense of ‘wrongness’ in the child. This can be further reinforced if the child has difficulty answering the loving and well-intentioned questions, which are naturally asked in the hope that the child will want to talk.

We are putting the child in an unfair situation. The child, who senses the mother’s and / or father’s discomfort, often does not know how to put words on what is sensed. It simply senses the mood and atmosphere, the shame and doubt. A child in discomfort rarely knows what it needs.

A child is a child. And we cannot use the same approach in the meeting that we use in the meeting with an adult.

Talk about it… with every child. According to the World Health Organisation, about 400 million people are suffering from mental health issues, worldwide. It therefore goes without saying, that there are a huge number of children and young people, all over the world, who grow up in families where parents are affected. This means that every child will at some point encounter people who are mentally vulnerable and children who have experienced parents having mental health problems.

My purpose is to inspire both parents and professionals, to talk to children about the reality they are a part of. This is so we can strengthen the connection and the relationship between parents and child. When we do that, we give the children the best conditions for a healthy and loving upbringing, despite the difficult circumstances they are in.

Through my books and the online course ‘HVAD BØRN IKKE VED… har de ondt af’ (in Danish), I want to inspire professionals and other adults to practise new way of conversations with children. Offering a language and a simple way of talking to children, which is fully of honesty, courage, empathy and understanding.

www.talk-about-it.eu
www.snakomdet.dk