Intergenerational trauma doesn’t just show up in obvious ways. It can show up in how we react to stress, how we interpret our children’s behavior, and how we show (or struggle to show) emotional support. Many parents weren’t raised in homes where feelings were named or validated. As adults, we may find ourselves overwhelmed by our children’s big emotions because they stir up unhealed parts of our own childhood.
Why Parental Trauma Often Gets Passed Down
Trauma doesn’t always disappear when a generation ends. Rather, unresolved pain often shapes how we parent and sometimes unconsciously. Research finds that parents who experienced childhood maltreatment or adverse experiences may have greater difficulty with emotional regulation and “mentalization” (understanding their own and their children’s feelings), which in turn increases the risk of behavioral or emotional problems in their children.
Another comprehensive review published in 2025 concluded that child maltreatment often follows intergenerational cycles, especially in families where parents have unaddressed trauma, but there is also evidence that targeted, trauma-informed parenting interventions can break that cycle.
Thus, for many parents, the challenge is not just about reacting to a child’s feelings. It’s also about working through their own unresolved pain so they can respond in healthier, more regulated ways.
The Foundation: Self-Regulation Before Co-Regulation
Before we can help our children, we often need to tend to ourselves. In the parenting world, this is sometimes framed as: calm first, then parent. One useful approach is described in a resource by a parenting educator, who advises parents to learn to pause when triggered rather than reacting and to use simple practices such as sensory grounding, breathing, or gentle movement to calm the nervous system. Similarly, a parenting-education organization highlights self-compassion and reframing as skills parents can use to manage their emotional reactivity. These self-regulation habits create the foundation for what comes next: co-regulation and emotional teaching.
Co-Regulation: Sharing Your Calm
Once you’re grounded, you can help your child ride the wave of emotion with you instead of getting pushed by it. This process, often called co-regulation, involves aligning your rhythm with your child’s breathing together, offering calming presence, gentle eye contact, soothing touch, or simple, calming activities.
Co-regulation doesn’t mean suppressing emotion or rushing to “fix” things. It means being emotionally available, regulated, and attuned and letting your child know it’s safe to feel big things, and that you are there to help.
Teaching Emotional Literacy: Giving Feelings Words
Part of breaking the trauma cycle is replacing confusion and shame around feelings with clarity and compassion. One vital step is teaching emotional literacy and helping children learn to identify and name what they feel, express it with words, and communicate their needs. When children grow up with parents who name feelings (“I feel sad,” “I feel angry,” “I felt scared when that happened”), they internalize a healthy emotional vocabulary. Over time, they learn to self-soothe, self-regulate, and seek help appropriately instead of acting out or internalizing pain.
When parents model calm, self-awareness, and emotional naming, children pick up those patterns early. Researchers have found that when parents display more positive affect and less anger especially during conflict or stress children tend to show better emotional and physiological regulation.
Healing Ourselves to Heal Our Children
Breaking intergenerational trauma is rarely easy but it is possible, and it starts with intention. Recognize that unresolved trauma may shape your reactions. Give yourself compassion, and practice small yet consistent self-regulation tools. As you begin to regulate yourself, you build a foundation for co-regulation which, in turn, creates a safer emotional world for your children.
Through co-regulation and emotional teaching, breathing together, using gentle movement or grounding, naming feelings, using “I” language, offering empathy, you can help your children develop emotional strength. And in doing so, you don’t just respond differently than you were raised; you literally give them a different emotional inheritance.