How Children Experience Trauma and How Parents Can Help Them Cope (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: How Children Experience Trauma and How Parents Can Help Them Cope Karyn Huenemann How Children Experience Trauma and How Parents Can Help Them Cope. By Meg Fargher and Helen Dooley. Johannesburg, South Africa: Penguin, 2011. 225 pages. There are not many books available that address the topic of what parents can do to help their traumatized child. Even the Child Trauma Institute website (http://childtrauma. com/) lists resources, but no published books aimed specifically at parents and caregivers. Perhaps this is because childhood trauma is, of course, such a delicate issue for both the child and the adults involved, a point that the authors of How Children Experience Trauma and How Parents Can Help Them Cope are careful to point out. While it is important for parents to understand their children's experiences and be given some specific ways to deal with their children's traumas, and I would like to see a book aimed effectively at parents and caregivers, this is not that book. The intent of the text is laudable, but the result is less valuable than one could hope for. The text is broken into a theoretical introduction and a number of case studies aimed at giving readers a more practical understanding of the various forms childhood trauma might take. While the authors explicitly assert that there is no standard scenario, that each instance of trauma is unique, many of the comments they make (for example, that "adolescents are invariably angry if they are attacked" [71]) over-generalize both the trauma and the child's response to it. This is perhaps the result of a broader generalization the authors make about childhood development, asserting for example that "in middle childhood [children]...are exposed too early to their own internal bitterness on account of the destructive behaviour of the adult world" (27). Such an assertion cannot go unchallenged for a significant number of children. This comment is emblematic of an insufficiently structured approach to both childhood and trauma, or at least a poorly structured expression of that approach. Throughout the introduction, the discussion circles inseparably through stages of development, types of trauma, and the style of clinical intervention, becoming both confusing and repetitious. The information underlying the discussion may be sound, but needs to be presented more simply, and with a voice that remains consistently aimed at the intelligent but non-expert parents, and that avoids the [End Page 82] use of specialist psychiatric terminology. The authors use a number of terms (such as "well-contained," "disintegration," and "latency age") that stem from their training in Freudian psychoanalytic theory and clinical psychology. These terms should be used sparingly, with a stronger reliance on a more colloquial vocabulary for the non-clinical readership. Once into the actual case studies, the structure becomes easier to follow, but the narratives seem excessively lurid; parents of traumatized children will perhaps not want to read such vivid descriptions of trauma. The "Aftermath" sections are theoretically sound, but list numerous case studies followed by an overarching discussion which does not sufficiently draw on the individual studies directly, and again leads to over-generalization and confusion. A more powerful approach would be to present a smaller number of exemplary case studies individually, and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of each before moving on to the next study. While the introduction speaks across cultural boundaries to trauma as a human experience, the case studies as well as the factual information included in the text are specific to a South African context. While this specificity renders the text more useful for its South African readership, it does diminish the universality of the authors' message that is suggested by the introduction. Overall, How Children Experience Trauma fails to achieve the admirable goals it sets forth. Rewritten with more careful attention to the needs of its target audience (that is, parents, not clinicians), this book could be quite valuable. Karyn Huenemann Simon Fraser University, Canada Copyright © 2012 Bookbird, Inc.