Post Traumatic Growth in Parenting

How to Use Your Hardest Times to Become a Better Parent and a Better Human.

(Photo: Sailing away from home at 16, bound for Hawaii)

I believe that a lot of parents who have been through the most often raise the most resilient kids.

I was sixteen years old in Tahiti, with a few hundred dollars, a half-packed bag, and the particular kind of existential dread that arrives when you realize your safety net just evaporated completely, and nobody is coming to help you figure it out.

My father had put me off the family boat during a family sailing trip halfway around the world. Not my boat. His boat.

That distinction, delivered with the terrifying calm of a man who had already made up his mind, landed like a physical thing.

I was sixteen. I was in the middle of the South Pacific. And I had to get myself back to the United States, and I had no idea what I was doing beyond getting my old job back and thinking about an uncertain future.

I hitched a ride on a 40-foot catamaran called the Shilo, bound for Hilo, Hawaii, 3,000 miles away. A couple with a toddler needed extra crew for the night watch.

I needed a lift. I stood midnight shifts under a cathedral of stars, sailing alone with my thoughts, trade winds blowing warmly across my face while I wrestled with fear and grief and the slow, clarifying realization that my childhood was suddenly over.

I’m not ashamed to admit I broke down in tears those first few nights.

But somewhere between fear and freedom, something shifted.

I write about this in my first book, The Red Circle, and in Puddle Jumpers both, because it is the foundational experience that shaped everything that came after it.

The moment I stopped waiting for rescue and started figuring out what I actually had to work with. That was the moment I stopped being a kid and started becoming whatever I was going to become.

Hard times can break or you can choose to learn from it and grow stronger.

We all have this choice and most of us have seen the outcomes of both sides.

You die a victim or you sharpen into something harder and more useful than what you were before.

That trip to Hawaii was the first time I understood, at a level below thought, that the hard thing was not the obstacle. The hard thing was the curriculum.

What post-traumatic growth actually means

Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun at the University of North Carolina developed the concept of post-traumatic growth in the mid-1990s after noticing something that the prevailing trauma literature was almost entirely ignoring.

A significant number of people who went through genuinely terrible experiences did not just recover to their previous baseline. They grew beyond it.

They came out the other side with stronger relationships, a deeper appreciation for life, new possibilities they had not previously considered, a greater sense of personal strength, and a spiritual or philosophical depth that was simply not there before the experience broke them open.

Post-traumatic growth is not the same as resilience. Resilience is bouncing back. Post-traumatic growth is bouncing forward.

It is not returning to who you were before the hard thing happened. It is becoming someone the hard thing made possible that the comfortable version of you never could have been.

The research is clear that this outcome is not automatic. Trauma does not produce growth on its own.

What produces growth is the way you process and integrate the trauma. The meaning you make from it. The decision, conscious or otherwise, to treat what happened to you as information rather than identity. As something that happened and taught you, rather than something that happened and defined you.

That distinction is everything. And it is learnable. Which is the thing most people who are sitting in the wreckage of something terrible need to hear and almost never do.

The wreckage I have worked with personally

I have had the following happen to me in the span of my adult life and I want to account for all of it honestly because the sanitized version helps nobody.

I lost my first business. Not a small setback. A real failure, the kind that costs you sleep and dignity and the particular confidence that comes from having built something. I lost my entire life savings in the process.

Then I went through a divorce that uprooted three kids from the stability they had known and sent all of us into a reorganization of everything that took years to fully settle. I moved cities. My kids moved schools.

We lost friendships and communities and the rhythms that make a family feel like a family rather than a collection of people navigating the same disruption.

I still remember the neighbors in San Diego asking me, “Where’s your family?”

It’s hard to answer that simply when you’re in the fallout of a fresh divorce.

I write about all of this in Puddle Jumpers without softening it because I think the softened version is a disservice to the parents reading it who are sitting in their own version of these situations and wondering if it is possible to come through them intact. It is. But not because the hard things were not hard. Because of what I decided to do with the hard things while they were happening and after they were over.

In Mastering Fear I write about fear as the fundamental human operating system. Every decision we make, every risk we take or avoid, every relationship we build or protect ourselves from, runs on the fuel of fear in one form or another.

The question is never whether you are afraid. The question is what you do with the fear. Whether you let it make you smaller or use it as the navigation system it was designed to be.

The Tahiti moment was fear. The business failure was fear. The divorce was fear. Coming home from Afghanistan to a baby I had never met was fear. Losing friends, and a best friend, Glen Doherty, in endless wars that followed post 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Every single one of those experiences tried to tell me something about what I valued, what I was made of, and what I needed to do next. The ones I listened to made me better. The ones I tried to outrun or numb or ignore cost me more than the original experience did.

“We went through hell as a family, and my kids still turned out to be joyful, bold, and resilient.”

That line is in Puddle Jumpers and it is the most honest summary of our family’s last twenty years I have ever managed to write. Hell was the input. Joyful, bold, and resilient was the output.

The distance between those two things is the whole story.

What does this have to do with parenting?

Everything. Completely everything.

The parent who has processed their own hardship and extracted meaning from it is a fundamentally different parent than the one who is still carrying it unexamined.

Not because the processed parent is tougher or more stoic or less affected. Because they have a framework for difficulty that they can pass on. They have a living example of what it looks like to go through something terrible and come out the other side not destroyed but changed. And their kids watch that. Every single day they watch that.

Some of the best parents I know have incredibly traumatic pasts.

In Puddle Jumpers I write about what the Hindus say. Gold becomes pure only after being forged in fire. Our children are no different. The parents who try to shield their kids from every difficulty are not raising resilient children. They are raising children who have never had the chance to discover what they are made of, which means they arrive at the first real difficulty of their adult lives without any evidence that they can handle it.

The parent who has been through something and processed it honestly is the parent who can sit with their kid in a hard moment without flinching. Who can say I know this feels impossible right now and mean it from a place of genuine understanding rather than sympathetic distance. Who can model, in real time, what it looks like to be in difficulty and still be functional.

(Photo: The Webb kids getting SCUBA certified in 2020)

That is what post-traumatic growth looks like in a parenting context. It is not a therapy concept. It is a transmission. You lived through something. You made meaning from it. And now your child watches you carry that meaning in the way you move through the world and files it away as evidence of what is possible for them.

My business failure taught me that identity and outcome are different things.

I had built my sense of self around being someone who built successful things. When the thing failed the identity threat was worse than the financial one. Learning to separate what happened from who I was took time and deliberate effort and produced a clarity about values that I could not have gotten any other way. I am a better parent because of it. More honest about failure with my kids. More willing to say I got that wrong and here is what I learned from it. Less invested in appearing infallible and more interested in being real.

The divorce taught me that two people can fail at a marriage and succeed at everything that came after it.

My ex, Gretchen, wrote the foreword to Puddle Jumpers. That is not a small thing. It is the product of years of choosing our kids over our grievances, of building a co-parenting relationship that required both of us to operate from values rather than feelings on the days when the feelings were not particularly cooperative. What I learned about communication, about putting the mission above the emotion, about the difference between what I wanted in a given moment and what actually mattered long term, came directly from navigating that experience. I carry it into every relationship and every difficult conversation I have now.

The Tahiti moment, which I have written about in The Red Circle and return to in Puddle Jumpers, taught me the most foundational thing I know. Which is that confidence does not come from being told you are capable. It comes from discovering it yourself in a situation where the alternative to figuring it out was genuinely bad.

That lesson shaped how I raised my kids. I did not protect them from difficulty. I let them encounter it with enough support nearby that they could survive it, and I watched them discover the same thing I discovered on that catamaran in the middle of the Pacific. That they were more capable than they thought. That the hard thing was not going to kill them. That they could be afraid and functional simultaneously.

That is the lesson.

Three thousand miles of open ocean and I had it before I was seventeen years old.

Post-traumatic growth does not happen by accident. It requires a set of deliberate choices about how you relate to what happened to you. Here is what that has looked like in practice for me.

The first choice is refusing the victim identity.

Not because the hard thing was not real or unfair or genuinely painful. Because the victim identity is a ceiling. It explains everything and changes nothing. The moment I stood alone in Tahiti and said I am not a victim was not bravado. It was a survival decision. The victim story would have kept me on that island. The growth story got me to Hawaii and beyond.

Every failure I have had, and I have had real ones, contained information.

The business failure told me something about the decisions I had made and the people I had trusted and the assumptions I had not questioned. I also realized I’d learned so much in the process. Business financing, how to read financial statements, legal, partnership structures and so much more.

The divorce told me something about communication and about what I needed to work on as a person to be a good father and coparent.

The Tahiti exile told me something about what I was actually made of when the structure was removed. None of those lessons arrived automatically. I had to go looking for them.

The third choice is making the lesson useful to someone else. This is where parenting comes in most directly.

The experience only compounds in value when you share it with your kids at the appropriate time.

This is something I wish I’d done more of as a father.

When you sit with your kid in their hard moment and tell them the true story of your own hard moment. When you model the processing rather than just the outcome. When you let them see the work rather than just the result.

From Puddle Jumpers: the reframing that changes everything

Every time a child fails is an opportunity for them to grow. Shield them from failure and you steal their chance to learn that they are capable of surviving it.

However, you should never let them believe that failure means they are broken. That is where the parent’s job is most important. Not to prevent the fall. To be present in it and help them find the frame that turns it into fuel rather than identity.

The parent who has done this for themselves is the only parent who can do it convincingly for their child.

Let’s Bring it all together

I want to be direct about something that tends to get lost in conversations about resilience and growth. Refusing the victim identity is not the same as minimizing what happened.

It is not about performing strength or pretending the hard thing did not hurt. It hurt. All of it hurt. The hard leather discipline from my father. Being alone in the Pacific. Losing my first business. Losing friends in the war as a Navy SEAL. Divorce, and learning how to be a different kind of dad.

The distinction I am drawing is between using the pain as information and using it as a permanent address.

Between processing something and moving through it versus parking in it and calling it home.

The victim identity makes the hard thing the most important thing about you. The growth identity makes the hard thing one of the things that made you. Read that again and let it settle.

That shift does not require you to forgive anyone who does not deserve it or to pretend that circumstances were fair when they were not. It only requires you to decide that what happened to you is not the last word on who you are or what is possible for you next.

My kids watched me make that decision in real time across some genuinely difficult seasons. They watched me lose the business and rebuild. They watched the divorce and the co-parenting that followed it. They watched me start over in new cities with new communities from scratch. And what they absorbed from all of it was not that life is easy or fair or reliably kind. What they absorbed was that a person can go through hard things and keep moving. That the moving is what matters. That the direction of travel, even when you are not sure exactly where you are going, is more important than the speed.

That is post-traumatic growth in its most practical form. Not a therapy outcome. A parenting philosophy. A way of moving through the world that says the hard thing is not the end of the story. It is, if you let it be, the most interesting part of it.

Gold becomes pure only after being forged in fire.

So do kids.

So do parents.

The fire is not the enemy.

It is the forge that produces better things in all of us if we choose it.