Adverse Childhood Experiences and Positive Parenting Programme
The Singapore Mental Health Study was started in 2016 and is looking at the prevalence of mental disorders in Singapore. The Straits Times published on the 16th July 2024, the findings from this study that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) could cost about $1.18billion a year.
Although this economic cost helps us to understand the scale of the problem it should not overshadow the emotional cost for families. Some adverse experiences are unpredictable and unpreventable e.g. parental death, and some there is much effort in place to limit for example through Child Protective Services. There is however an area that we all have a responsibility to resolve and that is developing the inner parent that we need, irrespective of the parenting we experienced. This can be for ourselves and for this generation of children.
What I mean by this is that when we are children, we have experiences that influence the way we see the world and how we solve problems. Sometimes we might notice that these strategies worked in the situations we grew up in but don’t work as well anymore.
Or perhaps they are not the perspectives or strategies we would like this generation of children to learn from because perhaps they don’t work as well as other perspectives and strategies. Humans are notorious for functioning on automatic pilot; how many times do you drive home and not remember the drive, or walk into a room and not remember what you went into the room for. When we do this, it is easy for us to treat ourselves how our parents treated us and treat children how we were treated. We might however want to change the script.
We might have experienced traumas and not want to turn these into transgenerational traumas or microtraumas. Making these changes can be really hard and requires lots of paying attention, being kind to ourselves and practicing new patterns. In 2021 a survey of experts in the field revealed that there was only consensus on Triple P (Positive Parenting Programme) being an of priority intervention for preventing the occurrence and impact of ACEs.
You wouldn’t start paid work without training, so why do your most important job of parenting without training? Triple P also takes advantage of recent updates from research in parenting to offer the best quality advice available, there is no need to do it in the dark when you can build on years of collective experience and research.
Triple P has been disseminated expansively across the world, you could join a collective of parents who are re-writing their family scripts to give their children a great start in life. Your family can be supported with Triple P and bespoke parenting support at Us Therapy.
Written & Reviewed by Dr. Marie-Claire Reville, in 2024
