12 Effects of CoDependency on Children

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this video on 12 effects of codependency on raising children. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. CEUs are available@allce.com Cody CEUs for counselors, social workers and marriage and family therapists. Let's start out by talking about what children need. And. And I remember a video or not? Not a video, a poster my mother used to have in the house when I was growing up that said that children learn what they live. And that's very true. If a child is growing up with a caregiver with codependency, guess what they're going to learn. Codependency. If a child is growing up in an environment where it's necessary to develop certain skills because their caregiver is not there, then they may also develop codependency. So what do children need? Let's start out with talking about what they need. Consistency. They need a caregiver who is consistently aware and available to them. It doesn't mean you have to be in the same room with them all the time, especially for older children, but being available to them is important. Responsiveness. Children need a caregiver who provide developmentally responsive interventions to their needs. What do I mean by that? Well, a two year old is going to need different interventions when they get upset than a 12 year old. You know, you're probably not going to have your 12 year old sit down and talk them through deep breathing and steps that you might take with a two year old. We want to provide developmentally appropriate interventions. We want to provide interventions that allow the child to identify and modulate their own emotions and communicate their needs on their own as much as possible. We want to empower them to do as much as they can and then help them the rest of the way. Attention. Children need caregivers who want to spend time with them, not caregivers who only respond when there's a problem or to meet their basic needs like come eat, let's take a bath, now go to bed. They need a caregiver who says, I'm interested in what you're interested in. Tell me about that. Tell me about the dinosaurs or the fairy princesses or whatever it is that the child is interested in. My daughter went through a phase when she was younger where she just adored frogs. And we had frogs in the little pond outside of our house that she would go out and play with. She actually created a little amusement park on a baking sheet one day that she set up with mud and everything else for them to to play on which was. Was very cute. But giving them proactive attention, validation, acknowledging the child's feelings, thoughts and needs in the moment. Even if you don't agree, it's important to recognize, okay, they are feeling scared, they are feeling angry. They are thinking this is unfair. All right, well, let me acknowledge that I see or I hear that you think that this is totally unfair. Let's talk about that. So you're respecting the child. You're letting them know that, hey, I hear you. I may not agree, but I hear what you're saying to me. Children need encouragement to practice skills, try new things, and assertively share their feelings, thoughts, and and needs. This encouragement says, all right, here is your safe zone, whatever that looks like for the child. Now, why don't you try stepping outside that safe zone. Maybe try out for this sports team or try taking this new class or whatever it is, but try something new that you haven't done before. You may find you're not very good at it and you fail. That's fine. You can come back into the safe, safe zone of home where we love you for who you are. But you also may find that it's something you really like and you're good at. So that'll expand your safe zone. And they need safety from emotional or physical harm or abandonment. They need to know where that safe zone is. They need encouragement to get outside of it sometimes, but they need it to come back to. They need to know that no matter how bad they screw up, that there is somewhere they can come home. They can always come back. Common problems in children with codependency or being who are raised in an environment with codependency. Behavioral acting out the class clown. The person who is the class clown is often trying to get attention. They may be trying to direct attention towards themselves so people aren't seeing the bad things that are going on over here. Or they may just be trying to get attention in the home environment. If there's a lot of chaos, sometimes a child will become the. The mascot, become the clown in order to distract parents, start fighting. The child will start cracking jokes or do being silly because in their mind, if I can start doing this, then they'll stop fighting. If they stop fighting, then I'm safe. Other children go the other direction and may become aggressive or may be the scapegoat in the family. Aggression is often, you know, is motivated by anger, is motivated by feeling unsafe. And the child who displays impulsive aggression is also showing that they're already emotionally dysregulated. They're already having difficulty coping with stress and feel terrified a lot of the time. Or sometimes children act with aggression because that's what they've seen at home. And finally, the hero. The hero is the one that gets straight A's. That's. That's the quarterback on the football team that tries to become the idyllic child that every parent or they think every parent would want. The reason they do this is often to number one, if I'm good enough, if I'm smart enough, then maybe they'll love me. Maybe they'll stop fighting and they'll love me. Maybe they'll stay together because if I don't make them angry, maybe they won't break up. So the hero may be a behavior that develops as a way of trying to maintain or control the family unit. All of these can be ways of trying to control the family unit to create some sort of safety. The child who was raised in a household with codependency and a dysfunctional other often experiences a lot of depression, a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Their caregivers are often not attentive to their needs. They're not consistently aware or responsive to the child's needs and feelings. So the child starts to feel worthless and helpless to manage their own emotions. Nobody's there for them. They may feel immense guilt and shame. Children personalize things. If things are not going well in the family, they may feel like it's their fault. It's my fault that caregiver relapsed. It's my fault that this caregiver is in their room crying. I did something that make dysfunctional other caregiver mad and dysfunctional Codependent caregiver is now mad at me. Therefore it must be my fault. Everybody's feelings are my fault. Anxiety. Children who are raised in codependent environments often have a lot of generalized anxiety. They're fearful of everything, partly because the codependent caregiver is constantly anxious and hyper vigilant. And the child picks up on this and they're like, I don't know what we're scared of, but we must be scared. They may have social anxiety. The person with codependency often has social anxiety. So the children may also develop it. And they may have abandonment or separation anxiety because their caregivers, number one, often aren't even attentive to them when they're in the same room. And when something goes wrong, when the dysfunctional other starts to relapse or decompensate, then they may go away and the Child often internalizes that. Sometimes they're told that by the codependent caregiver. The child internalizes that as their fault. And they're being rejected and abandoned. And children know they can't survive on their own. Nobody has to tell them, hey, you know, you can't go get a house, so you're stuck. Emotional dysregulation. When children are under chronic stress, just like adults, they will develop emotional dysregulation where their threat response system turns down its sensitivity. So most of the time they're kind of flat or fine, if you will. They, they're not real happy, but they're not real angry either. Kind of like Eeyore on, on Winnie the Pooh. But then when they get triggered, they go from 0 to 250. They are either frantic or furious. And for children, those behaviors may be very impulsive, very aggressive, very behaviorally oriented. Many children with who are growing up in environments with codependency, that's a very chaotic environment. Adverse childhood experiences include abandonment, include having a caregiver in the, in the household that has a mental illness, or having a caregiver in the household that has an addiction. Most children who grow up in a codependent environment have all three of those aces. Therefore, it's not unsurprising that most children who grow up in a codependent household or an addicted household may have developed complex PTSD many times. My experience has been many times people, people with complex PTSD are misdiagnosed as having ADHD because their anxiety keeps them fidgety, because their anxiety makes them restless, because their anxiety keeps them from getting good sleep at night, which means they're not able to concentrate as well during the day. They can develop all of the symptoms or a lot of the symptoms of ADHD as a result of, of complex post traumatic stress. So we really need to look at that. Can they have both of them? Possible. However, the diagnostic criteria for complex post Traumatic stress disorder in the ICD 11 clearly states if all of the symptoms can be adequately explained by complex post traumatic stress disorder, then you should not add additional diagnoses. Addiction. A lot of children growing up in environments with codependency develop addictions that can be video games, it can be watching pornography. Those are typically the two big ones because they can do those at home and they often have achievement issues. They're anxious, they can't concentrate, they're not getting good sleep, which means their learning is going to be impaired. The caregivers are often so focused on one another that they're not focused or able to devote the attention needed to help the child with homework and those sorts of things. So we do often see a lot of achievement issues. We see youth coming from these environments, falling asleep in school. That's one of the only places where they actually feel safe. Impact of codependency for the caregivers now, let's talk about this. Caregivers may not be able to be physically or emotionally present for the child, and that's going to trigger their abandonment fears. Caregivers have poor sleep, increased pain and illness, and reduced energy as a result of their codependency. These are just symptoms of codependency. So all of these things. Think about a caregiver who's exhausted, in pain and getting sick a lot. It's really hard for them to be attentive, let alone show proactive attention to the child. So that triggers abandonment fears and that starts to trigger feelings of low self esteem in the child because the child's going, well, you know, caregiver doesn't want to spend time with me or caregivers always sick. Affectively. Neglect and abuse. The person with codependency is so focused on keeping things just so and enabling and controlling the dysfunctional other that they often neglect unintentionally. You know, neglect is failing to provide something. They often neglect the child's emotional needs. They're just like, I can't focus on you right now, kid. I've got too many other things going on. Abuse sometimes happens when the caregiver with codependency starts to become angry themselves. And anger is a very common feeling in codependency. Anger and resentment and guilt. You know, it's just a whole mess of fight or flight feelings. But when the caregiver is in that state, when they are feeling angry, they may lash out and become verbally, sometimes physically, but usually only verbally abusive. They often fail to teach emotion management skills to the child. Well, to teach these skills in, you got to be aware when they're happening. You've got to notice that little Johnny is starting to get angry or is starting to feel sad. So then you can sit down and say, I see you're feeling sad, or I see you're feeling angry right now. You want to tell me about that? Okay. So in order to help children develop emotional vocabulary, emotion identification, emotion management skills, you first got to be able to help them identify those emotions. And they don't do that naturally. So the caregiver that is emotionally unavailable is not able to do that. So they can't teach the children these skills, which is another way. The lack of consistency and the lack of developmentally appropriate responsive interventions can be very devastating to the child. Additionally, the child often absorbs the distress from the caregivers and may model the adult, and that may come out in behavioral issues. They may feel like they need to be overly, overly responsible. They may feel like the only way to solve a problem is to yell. They may model whatever behaviors they're seeing at home. And just because of the immense level of palpable distress in this family system, the child may just simply emotionally dysregulate a lot and not have the tools to deal with these tsunamis of stress hormones. They may start becoming obsessively anxious about things because nobody has made them feel safe. They don't feel safe at home. They barely even get noticed at home. Or if they do get noticed, they're often being criticized for what they do and told they're not good enough. And because of the anxiety and the emotional dysregulation, there's often bouts of directed and misdirected anger. What I mean by that is the child may get angry and direct their anger at the person they're angry at, or they may get angry and they may take that anger out on somebody or something at school. But these are also, remember, behaviors of someone who's codependent, Someone who has codependency, has emotional dysregulation, the obsessive anxiety, and the bouts of anger. So you can see that the child is developing the behaviors of the codependent caregiver. Cognitively, the caregiver lacks attentiveness. They have difficulty being responsive, and they promote dysfunctional thinking and cognitive distortions. They have impaired concentration, hypervigilance, negativity, and pessimism. So it's important to recognize that children growing up in this environment are going to have difficulty concentrating at home. They're going to be hyper vigilant when they're out because they don't feel safe. And they're going to hear the negative and pessimistic words that their caregivers are often using. You know, focusing on the negative, focusing on what's always going wrong. And they may start to feel that the world is a very unsafe place environmentally. These children feel a sense, a gross sense of a lack of safety. The codependent parent often trying to keep the child from upsetting the dysfunctional other. You know, if the dysfunctional other has depression, you've got a daddy needs to sleep right now because he's not Feeling, well, you can't wake him up or it'll make it worse. Well then if they accidentally wake dad up, then they feel guilty, they feel like it's their fault if dad starts getting worse. Or if we're dealing with somebody who has an addiction and the same sort of thing, you know, your other caregiver, the dysfunctional other, is, you know, drunk right now or needs to sleep it off. You've got to be very, very quiet or they will fly into a rage. Well, imagine feeling like you're having to walk on eggshells around the house when you're 4, 5, 8, 10 years old. And as a result of the caregiver, the co with codependency, constantly trying to enable and protect and fix the dysfunctional other. Many times the children don't get their basic needs met. You know, they may not get dinner. Or if they do is, hey, go find, there's bologna and bread in the refrigerator, go make yourself something. I don't have the energy, I have to focus on the dysfunctional other. And relationally, the caregiver with codependency fails to teach boundary setting and interpersonal skills. They are violating boundaries all over the place themselves. That's part and parcel of codependency. Telling people what to think, what to do, how to feel, trying to fix it for, for them, not allowing them the space to try it on their own. And that's what they teach the child. And they teach the child, you're not competent, I have to do it for you. You can't make your own decisions, I have to do it for you. So the child fails to build self esteem because everything they do is either ignored or often wrong unless it is exactly what the caregiver with codependency told them to do. They also tend to promote abandonment fears and toxic guilt and shame. Telling the child, you know, if you wouldn't have made them mad, then they wouldn't have had to go out and drink and they would be here with us right now. If you hadn't awakened them from their stupor, then we wouldn't have all gotten in trouble. And this is your fault. You are causing these problems. As a result, the child develops low self esteem, a lack of consistency and responsiveness to their own needs. But remember, the codependent caregiver or the caregiver with codependency also has a lack of consistency and responsiveness. They often go from being enmeshed where they are telling the person what to think, what to do, how to feel too detached. I, I don't have time for you or I don't care. Do whatever you want to do. And this jumping between extremes is very confusing for children. The caregiver with codependency has all or most of their attention focused on fixing or appeasing the dysfunctional other, and the unspoken message in the household is abandonment is only one mistake away. If the videos on this channel have been helpful for you, please support us in our mission to make practical tools available to everybody. You can donate@docsnipes.com donate. You can join the channel@docsnipes.com join or you can purchase a thanks on any video that you particularly like. Codependency is no less damaging to the mental health of children than any other addictive behavior. To feel safe, loved, build self esteem, and develop emotion, regulation and interpersonal skills, children need a caregiver who is consistently responsive, nurturing, and has or is willing to learn the skills necessary to promote secure attachment.