09/30/2026
Today is Orange Shirt Day. Beneath the symbolism of the orange shirt lies a heavy truth: the thousands of Indigenous children forced away from their families to attend residential schools, where they suffered systemic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Many of those children never returned home, laid to rest in unmarked graves on school grounds—sites that investigators continue to uncover to this day.
Trauma does not stop with the individual; it transcends generations.
As parents, we can pause to imagine what it would mean to send a child off to school only to have them subjected to unimaginable cruelty, forced into a silence they carried for decades. Imagine the devastating reality of never seeing your child again.
Looking at this through the lens of both a father and a psychologist, the weight is profound. I cannot fathom what it would do to a parent-child relationship, nor the lifelong impact it has on a person’s capacity to form connections and trust.
When a person experiences severe trauma, it permeates every dimension of human functioning. It dismantles safety, shatters trust, and leaves individuals carrying misplaced guilt. That pain ripples across generations, altering the very fabric of how someone experiences parenting and family life. It remains a profound risk factor for anxiety, depression, addiction, and chronic pain later in life.
So, when the daily demands of parenting feel heavy—as they so often do—we are reminded of those who endured unimaginable loss and systemic devastation.
On a day like today, we hold space for that history, and perhaps find a moment of deep gratitude for the peace within our homes and the safety our children feel in our presence. Because so many children, and so many parents, were denied that fundamental right.
