Children are no different than any other person in wanting to understand their surroundings and eventually learn to have some control within their surrounds too. When a child wants to do something themselves and are not allowed to learn they can learn to feel defeated rather than empowered. Other times we can impose our parental desires for their life and dismiss their aspirations leaving them feeling diminished and inauthentic. Impatience with mistakes often creates trauma. When our words attack their charter directly rather than their actions it can make a lasting impression. My sister’s son once mentioned that calling him selfish a few times messed him up for years. By not understanding emotions ourselves we then fail to teach our children to identify, process, release and thus regulate how they feel at any given time; we don’t give them the tools they need to cope with adult life. Children want the same thing we all do, to feel loved, valued and accepted for who they are and any messages or conditioning that go against that have the potential to cause trauma. And this is exactly the reason we often don’t understand what happens in our adult children’s lives, because we don’t understand the importance of all types of traumatic events, even the most subtle.