When the Village Turns Away: Parent Blame and Generational Trauma

A PAR mum reflects on her mum's experience and how she found herself "in care" and the village that was meant to raise just didn't turn up.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. But what happens when the village turns its back?

My mum was barely more than a child herself when she had me — vulnerable, frightened, and trying to navigate a world that never gave her a fair start. She needed support, someone to believe in her, to show her how to build a life instead of watching it fall apart. But instead of support, she got judgment. Instead of kindness, she got shame.

She was painted as a problem long before anyone asked what had happened to her.

Is it any wonder, really, that she ended up in dangerous relationships — the kind that promise love but deliver bruises and fear? That she turned to substances to numb the pain, to survive just one more day? That prison became another chapter in a story that society helped write?

People like to talk about choices, but no one seems to talk about options. And she didn’t have many.

So when people ask me how I ended up in care, I can’t help but think — what hope did I have of staying out?

When your mother is drowning and the world watches from the shore, how are you supposed to learn to swim?

The care system was supposed to be my safety net — but it was a safety net full of holes.There were as many harms there as there were at home, just different ones. The kind that don’t always leave bruises, but leave scars all the same. Loneliness. Displacement. The feeling of being unwanted, unseen, shuffled around like luggage that no one quite knows what to do with.

People said I was “safe” now. But safe doesn’t always mean loved. It doesn’t mean nurtured. It doesn’t mean healed.

The truth is, I wasn’t the only one failed — my mum was too. We both fell through the cracks of systems and communities that promised protection but delivered judgment. Our village should have been our lifeline, but instead it became another source of pain — watching, whispering, walking away.

It’s taken me years to understand that what happened to us wasn’t just about bad luck or bad choices — it was about absence. The absence of support. The absence of understanding. The absence of a village that cared enough to stand beside us instead of standing apart.

Because when the village turns away, when compassion is replaced with blame, it’s not just one child who suffers. It’s generations.

It takes a village to raise a child. But first, it takes a village willing to care.

advocacy; Scotland; Generational trauma; parent blame; children in care