• Many children witness upsetting events. Contrary to what some adults believe, they often want to talk about these events. 

• Acknowledging children’s talk about these events is important for supporting their healthy processing and development. 

• Rather than avoiding children’s talk about upsetting experiences, caregivers should follow their children’s lead, echo what they say, and ask open-ended questions (e.g., “And then what happened?”). In this way, parents help their children make sense of those experiences. 

• Caregivers can adopt an emotion-coaching approach to help children label their emotions rather than telling children what they should or should not feel about upsetting events. 

Many children witness violence, death (of loved ones or strangers), natural disasters, abuse, and other upsetting events. Often, they want and need to talk about these events. 

Consider this conversation between a researcher and a six-year-old research participant, which occurred during a study on the linguistic structure of children’s descriptions of everyday topics. While talking about going to the beach, the young boy said, “My brother died.” The adult, a trained interviewer, responded, “Your brother what?” 

The boy continued, “My brother died. Um, he, um, was making a sandwich, and he fell, and a knife went in his heart.” Fortunately for the shocked interviewer, her protocol called for her to simply repeat the child’s words rather than evaluate what she had heard.  

How likely is it that adults will hear such talk about troubling events in everyday interactions with children? Estimates of this occurrence are hard to come by and vary widely. 

Children talk about disturbing events during spontaneous personal narratives

In a study of nearly 100 U.S. three-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half-year-olds on the developing structure of personal narratives, Carole Menig-Peterson and I found that more than half of the children who were at least six years old spontaneously produced narratives about the death of strangers, pets, and even immediate family members; such content was not as common among younger children. The interviewers had asked the children about likely events in daily life, such as whether they had ever gotten a shot at the doctor’s office or gone to a birthday party.

To our surprise, many of the older children had experienced traumatic events and even more surprisingly, seemed to want to talk to us about them.  

The children in this study were from a small town or rural area of a midwestern U.S. state and had no identified learning disabilities. All were European North American and from middle-class families, and none lived in a war zone or a high-crime area. 

Children talked about upsetting events despite the fact that the researchers did not mention death or anything approaching such a potentially traumatizing event. To our surprise, many of the older children had experienced traumatic events and even more surprisingly, seemed to want to talk to us about them. 

For children, exposure to disturbing events is not uncommon

In research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in eight- to 12-year-old Dutch children, scientists also found that many children had witnessed disturbing events in their lives. They defined traumatic events as those characterized by “death, serious injury, or other threat to physical integrity” (Alisic et al., 2012, p. 274), and prevalence estimates ranged from 14% to 65%. 

For children living through times of war, of course, the incidence of witnessing traumatic events would be even higher. In short, exposure to deeply disturbing events is not rare in children’s lives. 

Caregivers’ responses to children’s comments about traumatic events 

Like the interviewer mentioned earlier, parents and other caregivers are often jolted by a child’s mention of these events and confused about how to respond. In reaction, most adults turn to a variety of strategies. 

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Some do not respond at all, whether due to their own discomfort with the information or concerns about potential negative effects of focusing on the trauma. However, such well-intentioned efforts to protect children can backfire, leaving them without a supportive outlet for expressing and processing their thoughts and feelings about the experience.

Avoiding discussion with children about upsetting experiences can backfire

For example, in a study of 40 five- to 18-year olds (19 boys, 21 girls) who experienced a traffic accident, children who did not talk with anyone about the accident said they did not feel understood. They also experienced more symptoms of PTSD (e.g., irritability, trouble sleeping, hypervigilance) 30 weeks later than did children who spoke about the accident with trusted adults. 

In this study, the children were questioned six weeks after the accident about whether they had talked about the accident with anyone (e.g., family, friends, therapist). This is important because of what we know about the value of psychologically debriefing individuals within days of a potentially traumatic event. 

When such talk is initiated right after the accident by someone other than the person who experienced the event, it may do more harm than good, even increasing trauma rather than decreasing it. However, if a child initiates such talk soon afterwards, then parents should follow the child’s lead and listen responsively. 

Opportunities to support children’s processing of trauma 

Children’s spontaneous initiation of talk about trauma is key, and we encourage caregivers to see such initiation as an opportunity to support how children navigate their reactions to difficult experiences. Although almost all parents want to help their children do just that, not all parents are prepared to do so effectively, despite having good intentions. 

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Researchers have identified three general parenting styles that actually exacerbate symptoms of trauma in young children (Alisic et al., 2012): 

1. Avoidant parenting: Some parents are withdrawn and unavailable to children as a result of their own insecurity and trauma.  
2. Overprotective parenting: Out of fear that their child may be traumatized again, some caregivers are overprotective, preoccupied with fear that their child will be retraumatized by talking about a difficult event. 
3. Frightening parenting: Some parents repeatedly quiz their child on details about the trauma, frightening their child in the process. 

In contrast, consider what researchers describe as supportive parenting, beneficial parenting that occurs in response to children’s initiation of talk about trauma. These parents take care to feel safe themselves and to be in control of their emotions (though this does not necessarily mean refraining from crying). They listen to what their children say about the difficult experience. 

What caregivers can do to support their children through trauma 

Caregivers help by acknowledging children’s difficult experiences 

Of particular importance is adults’ acknowledgment of what children say by engaging in a supportive dialog about the experience. Specific strategies include: 

• Asking questions, especially open-ended questions (e.g., “What happened then?”) 

• Making follow-up statements (e.g., after a child reminisced about a parent’s fear that a tornado would take their house down, one mother replied, “You’re right, we got lucky.”)  

• Repeating the child’s words back to the child, which clarifies and ensures that they were heard. This strategy can be especially useful when a parent is caught off guard by a child’s comments. 

Caregivers help by following children’s lead 

Supportive conversations between caregivers and children about difficult experiences allow children to take the lead. If a child wants to talk about these experiences, responsive caregivers show that they are willing. If a child does not seem to want to talk about them, parents should not drill them for information. 

Some caregivers find that their child is willing to talk under certain circumstances (e.g., while on a car ride) but not others (e.g., face to face). These conversations about difficult experiences occur when children (as well as parents) feel comfortable. 

Caregivers help by respecting children’s negative emotional experiences and coaching them through these emotions 

Parents and other caregivers sometimes think they know what their children would feel about difficult experiences, but this is not necessarily true. Adults who want to support their children after challenging events should be especially careful about labeling what children feel about the events. 

Occasionally mislabeling an emotion might not enhance a child’s sense of being understood, but it probably does not do damage in the long run. However, evidence suggests that when such mislabeling is repeated often, it is not optimal for children. Instead, caregivers should let children describe their own emotions and use strategies (e.g., ask questions, follow up, and rephrase) to help check their comprehension of children’s communication. 

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As caregivers navigate emotional discussions with their children, they tap into meta-emotion philosophy, defined as “an organized set of feelings and thoughts about one’s own emotions and one’s children’s emotions” (Gottman et al., 1996, p. 243).  

Some parents develop a dismissive attitude toward negative emotions

In research with five- to eight-year-olds, some parents adopted a dismissive attitude toward negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger), ignoring or denying those emotions out of fear that their children’s sadness or anger would upset them. They tried to distract their children from talking about their feelings. Other caregivers were intrusive, critical, and mocking of their children, which is derogatory behavior that is characteristic of parental rejection. 

In contrast, other caregivers in the same study expressed awareness of negative emotions in themselves and their children, saw their children’s expressions as opportunities to become close with or instruct their children, and validated their children’s negative feelings. These parents’ style reflects an emotion-coaching philosophy. 

As caregivers who adhered to this philosophy, these adults helped their children verbally label negative emotions correctly and assisted them in identifying resolutions to the emotional experiences. The children of these emotion-coaching parents had better emotional regulation and peer interactions three years later than did the children of adults who demonstrated dismissive or derogatory parenting.  

Caregivers help by using direct words that minimize risk of misinterpretation 

Elementary school children often ask caregivers questions about death, and it is a common impulse for adults to use terms like “went to sleep” or to explain the circumstances by saying the person or animal “was very sick.” 

However, children this age are famously literal in their interpretations of such euphemisms, perhaps leading them to believe that when they themselves go to bed or get sick, they will disappear like their pet or grandparent did. It is better for children’s comprehension to call death what it is, even if it feels insensitive due to cultural tendencies. 

Additional advice 

Of course, in extreme cases – when a deeply traumatic event occurred or when children seem excessively upset – parents may seek therapy for their children. This kind of therapy inherently involves confronting the event and talking about it. Prior to such therapy, caregivers are advised to confine themselves to asking open-ended questions (e.g., “And then what happened?”) and avoiding yes/no questions (e.g., “Did the man touch you there?”). 

Letting children take the lead is advisable and associated with children’s well-being, allowing them to begin to move past the trauma.

Based on an extensive review of evidence, researchers have devised a structured interview for children who are suspected of having been abused (Lamb et al., 2007). Such an approach is difficult for even trained interviewers to adhere to; parents will likely also find advice in this blog difficult to follow, but they are still encouraged to try using open-ended questions that encourage children to elaborate on their descriptions based on their own needs and comfort levels.

In other cases – such as when a child continually avoids mention of what happened – caregivers may want to consult their local children’s librarian for books that may help them discuss the issue. The American Psychological Association (through Magination Press) has a list of books that promote children’s mental health, including books related to trauma. 

In summary, parents and other caregivers should be prepared to talk about upsetting events with their children, ensuring that both the children and the adults feel safe. Letting children take the lead is advisable and associated with children’s well-being, allowing them to begin to move past the trauma.

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1. Ask your children to remember what they did at school, other times they were away from you, or when you went on a special outing. If children cannot think of anything to say, ask more specific questions.
2. Listen to what your children tell you. Ask follow-up questions, including how they felt about what happened. Avoid correcting your children about their impressions.
3. These conversations can happen anytime there are moments to spare – for example, at a bus stop or in a waiting room.
4. Elaborative reminiscing can support children’s developing language and literacy skills (e.g., narrative skills, vocabulary understanding, phonological awareness) and socioemotional development (e.g., less anxiety and withdrawal, increased helping behaviors, better understanding and control of negative emotions, improved autobiographical memory).

“What did you do in school today?”: Elaborative reminiscing can yield answers

Most parents, when picking up their child from school, have asked, “What did you do in school today?” and heard their child respond, “Nothing.” What happens next depends on many factors, but mostly it depends on the parent.

Some parents think their child just does not want to talk about their day and change the subject. Other parents challenge their child (e.g., by saying something like, “No, that was not what happened…”), which is usually no more successful at eliciting descriptions of the child’s experiences than changing the subject. Success would be getting a child’s own extended description of what happened during some experience.

Photo: Tatiana Syrikova. Pexels.

My colleague Carole Peterson (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada) and I wanted to understand better what strategies parents use that can effectively get children to share something about their day.

We conducted a study in Newfoundland (Canada), with middle-class, European American families with two- to two-and-a-half-year-old children.  We found that the most successful parent strategy for eliciting information was asking specific follow-up questions, such as, “What did you play at recess?” or “What stories did the teacher read to you?”

Children of parents who asked a lot of questions about one particular topic became the best narrators over a year later, telling lengthier stories that included more key elements, such as background information and details about how situations got resolved.

We call such parents topic extenders. Other researchers have found similar results and dubbed this kind of extensive conversing between parents and children elaborative reminiscing or joint reminiscing.

Elaboratively reminiscing benefits children’s language and socio-emotional development 

Peterson and I, along with Beulah Jesso (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada), then engaged in an experiment in which we randomly assigned parents of children (average age 3 years and 7 months old) in families with low incomes to one of two conditions.

In the first, we talked to parents about elaborative reminiscing and how important it could be to their children’s language acquisition; the second was a business-as-usual control group.

Collaborative, elaborative reminiscing with children of various ages benefits the children linguistically, cognitively, emotionally, and academically.

After a year, despite not specifically mentioning vocabulary to parents, children in the experimental (elaborative reminiscing) group had significantly better receptive vocabulary (the ability to understand words) than those in the control group.

After another year, they also had significantly better narrative skills. We learned that storytellers are made, not born.

Elaborative reminiscing benefits additional areas of language and socio-emotional development

Elaborative reminiscing benefits children in a variety of ways. Research has shown that, in addition to improvements in children’s vocabulary and narrative structure, elaborative reminiscing increases children’s phonological awareness, which is critical for learning to read. Reading interactively with children does not have the same effect.

In addition to promoting language benefits, elaborative reminiscing affects children’s socioemotional development in many ways, reducing children’s tendencies to act out or have internalizing problems (e.g., sadness, anxiety, withdrawal), and increasing their prosocial skills (e.g., being kind and helpful to others).

Such reminiscing helps children understand their negative emotions and regulate them. Children’s memory of their own lives (autobiographical memory) is also more coherent.

Teaching parents how to elaboratively reminisce

Many different families have benefitted from learning of the importance of elaborative reminiscing. Children who live in poverty benefit; after all, elaborative reminiscing costs nothing, requires no particular accomplishment or comfort with reading books on the part of their parents, and is fun.

Photo: Ketut Subiyanto. Pexels.

Parents from New Zealand families of diverse backgrounds have benefited from this kind of instruction. In addition, my colleague Ashleigh Hillier (University of Massachusetts Lowell) and I have taught parents of teenagers on the autism spectrum to engage in elaborative reminiscing, something that the parents had not considered important but that extended parents’ talk about the past with their teenaged children.

Moreover, this type of reminiscing may even benefit children who have been maltreated by their mothers. When these mothers learn to elaboratively reminisce with their children, their children may eventually have better physiological regulation.

Cultural qualities of reminiscing

Despite the fact that observing and learning about elaborative reminiscing has been successful in a number of different cultures, parent-child talk about the past has documented some cultural differences.

Many Asian cultures do not value extensive talk about an individual’s past experiences. In particular, many Japanese parents consider such lengthy talk unsuitable. Cultural differences in reminiscing conversations have also been found in Western European cultures, such as Germany, Sweden, and Estonia.

How to elaboratively reminisce with children

Parents should understand that collaborative, elaborative reminiscing with their children at various ages benefits the children linguistically, cognitively, emotionally, and academically. In this work, parents are encouraged to accept their children’s view of what happened, even if the parents have different ideas.

The more you reminisce with your child, the better they will get at doing so and the more you will foster their well-being in many areas of development.

I have collected examples of children’s talk about going to Disney World and Disneyland. When parents asked children to tell their grandparents their favorite part of the adventure, they expected children to say “meeting Goofy” or “going on the It’s a Small World ride.”

Instead, children said their favorite things were experiences like the “blue lights on the floor of the plane,” “a real dead armadillo on the side of the road,” and “two sinks in our bathroom.” Parents who accept their children’s point of view learn a lot about their children’s thoughts and values and foster their development.

The best times to reminisce with children include when you are eating dinner together or waiting for doctors or buses or driving somewhere together. Children especially enjoy being asked about what to them are notable events.

For example, you might ask: Did anybody do something weird in preschool today? Did you get hurt? Do you remember what happened the last time we went to the doctor’s office?

Tell them about experiences you have had (e.g., the time you got in trouble with a teacher). The more you reminisce with your child, the better they will get at doing so and the more you will foster their well-being in many areas of development.

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Speaking your first language at home provides important advantages, supporting child development, reading and educational attainment.

The best way for children to excel at English is to be good at their own native language. The message from academic research is that, at home, smart parents should stick with the language they know best. Speak that with your children – even if you can’t read it with them.  English will take care of itself in time – and be better as a result.

It’s a simple principle, but one that has been much disputed amid the mythologies surrounding multilingualism. Many people continue to believe – contrary to overwhelming evidence – that speaking to children in their native language confuses them and slows them down in learning dominant public languages such as English.

As a result, many parents coming to the US and the UK from other countries inadvertently and tragically rob their children of vital language-learning skills. They make the mistake of focusing on English and silencing or downgrading their mother tongue at home.

If you downgrade your heritage language, you deprive a child of access to a whole lot of enriching experiences… that can also affect their reading ability and access to the school curriculum.

I’ve seen the results. In a facility that provides child care to at-risk infants and children, there is a new three-year-old girl whom aides refer to as the “Shut-up Girl.”

Her single mother speaks Spanish and is an undocumented immigrant.  The little girl, however, knows little Spanish so far as her caregiver (a native Spanish-speaker) can tell.

Whenever anyone addresses her in any language, all the little girl does is yell, “Shut up!”  Evidently, that is one phrase her mother knows in English and has taught her daughter.

If you downgrade your heritage language in this way, you deprive children of access to a whole lot of enriching experiences. They do not get the benefit of you speaking in your most proficient language. As a result, they miss out on your capacity to engage with them at your best, using enriched communication, full of vocabulary, syntactical and grammatical complexity as well as lengthy, complex stories.

All of these factors are linked to developing their long-run capacity to learn other languages – including the dominant language – proficiently. These losses can also affect their reading ability and therefore, ultimately, their access to the school curriculum.

We now know that oral language difficulties are the root of many reading problems.  Two-year-olds are unable to tell a narrative. Some parents talk with these children, asking them about who they played with, whether they went out in the snow.

These are the children, typically, who, by the ages of four or five, can give a long narrative. And that early capacity predicts success in reading and comprehension tests a few years later. So it’s wise to be speaking to young children in your best language.

Sharing these insights is vital, given that many parents may feel their own language is less prestigious than English. They don’t realize that it is a wonderful gift, a great tool that they have brought with them.

Some fear that using it could block their children’s opportunities, whereas, in fact, proficiency in their native language enhances children’s life chances via their improved capacity to learn languages and to connect properly with extended family and community. There are parallels here with sport – the sprinters who become bobsled champions – and with music. A violinist’s capacity to learn the piano is enhanced, not hampered, by them playing their first instrument well.

Appreciating the value of the spoken native language and mother tongue is particularly important for parents who lack literacy skills. I remember a Portuguese mother, who was not very literate even in her own language. Her daughter came home saying that her teacher said it was important to read books at home. But every time they went to a read book, they would end up screaming at each other.  I said to this mother: “Just talk with your child in Portuguese and things will go better.”

Parents can find it difficult for lots of reasons to support early reading in their native language. Take Cambodians, for example – the Khmer Rouge destroyed reading material and killed many of the people who could read. So many parents cannot read and don’t have access to books. For them, the best advice is to speak to their children in Khmer.

In short, telling parents to read with children is not nearly as important as telling them to talk about whatever is of interest to the children. If the children are interested in trucks, talk about trucks. If they aren’t, don’t talk about trucks. Just talk about what matters to them.

Language deficiency can be a source of great social disadvantage, but proficiency can be a route to enhanced life chances. We need to make sure that parents, desperate to give their children opportunities in a new and sometimes hostile country, do not inadvertently make life more difficult for them.

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