Yesterday (Feb 7th) marked the last day of Children’s Mental health week. My work as a mental health nurse practitioner has made me peel back the onion layers to find that a lot of the challenges we face in our adulthood with our wellbeing stem from childhood. Children come into the world in form of a “Tabula rasa” – Latin word to mean blank slate. They have nothing imprinted on them – their mental state and ideas are shaped by the world around them and the words they hear spoken over them. Often times as parents and adults, we hold kids to a higher standard than we even hold to ourselves. We forget that their 3,5 or 8 year old brain is still developing the language skills to put into words what they are feeling at that exact moment. For some reason a newborn crying for milk does not elicit the same response from us as a toddler crying at the store for candy – different desire, same language. Yet we expect the toddler should have mustered the skill and impulse control to say, “okay I think I will not cry for that candy I so badly desire.” (The part of the brain -prefrontal cortex-that is responsible for impulse control is not fully developed until the mid-20s). There is a phrase that irkes me terribly, when I hear, “Use your words.” I mean…. as a child I would be thinking – “Well, If I had the words to use, I surely would have told you what I wanted five minutes ago.” Often a child crying or “acting out” triggers parts in our childhood that we may have kept tucked away yet they caused some of our greatest wounds. If You Don’t Heal What Hurt You, You’ll Bleed on People Who Didn’t Cut You. I totally understand the notion “our parents parented with the best information they had at the time.” It is valid. We must acknowledge it, but we cannot use it as a get-out-of-jail-card to pass on our own trauma to the next generation. The rise in childhood mental health diagnosis such as anxiety, attention deficit etc is at a rate never seen before. Holding a safe space for a child to feel seen, heard and validated is crucial to maintaining their wellbeing. They cannot do this if half the time they are trying to navigate and figure out our emotions for us. We must do the hard work of looking at our soul mirror and truly unpacking any emotional baggage that is easily triggered by a toddler tantrum at Walmart.