18/12/2025
Parents often say, “My children understand what is going on.”
This is an unsafe and unfair assumption.
Children do not have the emotional maturity, cognitive comprehension, nervous system regulation, or life context to truly understand adult crises such as marital conflict, divorce, separation, death, or financial instability. What looks like understanding is often survival, silence, compliance, or emotional shutdown.
If a situation feels overwhelming, confusing, or destabilising for you as an adult, it is far more overwhelming for a child who lacks language, power, and emotional tools to process it safely.
Counselling shifts the perspective from “My child seems fine” to the more honest and protective question:
“If this is hard for me, what is it doing to my child?”
That awareness is often the moment parents realise that support is not a weakness, but a responsibility.
Child counselling is not about pathologising children. It is about protecting their emotional development, nervous system health, and long term wellbeing before unspoken pain becomes lifelong wounds.
