There Is No Simple Answer
There is no single answer to that question. But there is a wider truth that deserves to be said plainly, with care and without blame:
The pathway into state care is rarely just ‘individual choices.’ It is history. It is stress carried in the body across generations. It is poverty, violence, addiction, disconnection from culture and identity — and the way those experiences can become biological patterns that travel forward, quietly, long before anyone understands what is happening.
I appreciate how difficult a subject this is. For me, given my current life stage and work, it is time to say it plainly.
The Reality in Numbers
Statistics matter because they show patterns. Māori Tamariki remain significantly over-represented in care and protection pathways in Aotearoa.
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Tamariki Māori in care (per 1,000) – 9 in 1,000 Compared with fewer than 2 per 1,000 non-Māori (Oranga Tamariki, 2023) |
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Reporting rate (per 1,000) – 79 per 1,000 Māori Tamariki reported to Oranga Tamariki, versus 23 per 1,000 non-Māori |
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Intergenerational pattern – ~70% Of Māori parents who experienced care themselves report subsequent involvement of their own children with Oranga Tamariki (The Spinoff, 2025) |
These figures are not evidence of individual failure. They reflect children repeatedly confronting the same unanswered questions: why home was not safe, why their parents struggled, and why the patterns kept returning despite everyone’s best intentions.
“The statistics don’t tell us who these children are. They tell us how far back the wound goes — and how urgently the healing is needed.”
What Epigenetics Tells Us (In Plain Language)
DNA is like a recipe book. Epigenetics doesn’t rewrite the recipes — but it can change which ones get read more often, and how strongly they show up. The recipes themselves don’t change. But what gets consumed, and how frequently, can.
Research on intergenerational trauma describes how severe stress can shape biological systems — especially the systems managing stress hormones and immune function — and how some of those effects may be carried forward across generations through epigenetic mechanisms (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018).
Research involving Indigenous populations who experienced forced child removal — including residential schools in Canada and the Stolen Generations in Australia — has found altered patterns in specific genes involved in stress regulation and neurodevelopment (Matheson & Anisman, 2019). These findings align with what Māori have always understood: trauma is carried through whakapapa, not confined to individual memory.
This does not mean trauma is destiny. It means the body adapts to what it repeatedly experiences — and those adaptations can echo. However, what can echo forward can, with the right conditions, echo differently.
Why Age Matters: The Developmental Windows
Trauma doesn’t land the same way at every stage of life. The timing matters enormously.
• Around age 7: Children develop narrative memory and causal reasoning. Removal at this stage is often remembered vividly and may become woven into their identity — frequently accompanied by self-blame. The child who is separated at this age is old enough to remember, and young enough to decide it must be their fault.
• Ages 10–11: A sensitive period in which trauma exposure is associated with heightened amygdala reactivity and altered threat perception (Dennison et al., 2016). For children in care, repeated placement changes and multiple social workers during this window intensify the stress load at exactly the moment the brain is most responsive to it.
• Ages 14–16: The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and emotional regulation — is undergoing critical development. Trauma during this period is associated with a significantly higher likelihood of substance use, self-harm, and contact with the justice system (Layne et al., 2014). What looks like ‘bad choices’ at this age is very often a developing brain doing its best under impossible conditions.
• At 18, Many young people age out of care. The outcomes — housing instability, lower employment, higher mortality — reflect not personal failure but the consequence of a system that offers transition without foundation (Independent Children’s Monitor, 2024).
Biology is not the destination. But it helps explain why the journey looks the way it does.
‘Why Can’t They Just Stop?’
This is the hardest question children carry. Why can’t Mum stop drinking? Why can’t Dad control his anger? Why does the violence keep coming back?
Sometimes the honest answer is this: because the parent is carrying unhealed trauma, and their nervous system is living as if danger is always near. They may be self-medicating a body that won’t settle. They may be reacting from survival wiring rather than choice. They may be repeating what was done to them, not because they want to, but because no one ever showed them anything else.
That does not excuse harm. Children deserved — always — to be safe. But it explains why shame, punishment, and ‘just try harder’ approaches so often fail. Because they don’t touch what the body is doing, and the body is where the wound lives.
“When we ask why parents can’t just stop, we are asking the wrong question. The right question is: what would it take to make stopping possible?”
The Oranga Tamariki Paradox
Removal can be necessary. Sometimes it is the only way to keep a child safe in the short term, and that safety matters absolutely.
But separation itself is a stress event — particularly for younger children — and can introduce additional biological consequences even when it is the right call (Widom et al., 2015). The Independent Children’s Monitor has noted repeatedly that parental desire for reunification is often unsupported by sufficient trauma-informed, culturally grounded services (Independent Children’s Monitor, 2023). Without addressing the parents’ own trauma history, reunification is unlikely to hold.
This is the paradox: the system intervenes to protect the child from the parent’s wound, but rarely has the resources to heal the wound itself. So the wound waits, and the pattern continues.
What Te Poutama o te Ora Offers
Te Poutama o te Ora was not developed from a textbook. It emerged from lived experience — from Matapihi Kirihou, from the plastic windows, from the long reckoning with what poverty, colonisation, and accumulated silence do to people across generations.
Its nine-dimensional structure is designed precisely for the complexity of what we are describing here. Not a single intervention for a single symptom, but a sustained, multi-domain journey of healing across the whole of a person’s life.
• Taha Tuakiri (Identity Wellness): Placed at the centre of TPO because you cannot heal the body without healing identity. For Tamariki in care, and for the parents who lost them, reconnecting with who you are — your whakapapa, your Reo, your belonging — is not supplementary to healing. It is the foundation.
• Taha Whakapapa (Relational & Ancestral Wellness): Acknowledging that the wound has a lineage, and that lineage also carries the seeds of a different story. What travels through whakapapa can include healing as well as harm.
• Taha Tinana (Physical Wellness): Attending to the body that has been braced, that has self-medicated, that is holding decades of unprocessed experience. The body is not separate from the healing.
• Taha Hinengaro (Mental & Emotional Wellness): Building the capacity to understand and name what happened, without shame. Psychoeducation is a form of dignity.
• Taha Wairua (Spiritual Wellness): Reconnecting with a sense of worth and belonging that is not conditional on performance, on sobriety, on having got everything right. A worth that predates the wound.
TPO’s cyclical structure reflects what the science also tells us: epigenetic modification doesn’t happen through a single intervention. It happens through sustained, consistent, culturally safe change over time. The Maramataka reminds us that healing has seasons. This is a long cultivation, not a quick fix.
A Word to Parents and Whānau in the Care System
If you are a parent navigating Oranga Tamariki involvement, this is not written to blame you.
Many parents in these pathways are carrying layers: poverty, violence, addiction, unmanaged grief, disconnection from culture, and often their own experiences of being unsafe as children. The wound you are carrying was very likely given to you before you had the capacity to refuse it.
If your body reacts fast, shuts down, numbs out, or reaches for something that gives temporary relief — please hear this:
That does not make you a bad parent. It means your system learned survival, and survival can be unlearned when the conditions are right, and the support is real.
Healing rarely begins with judgment. It begins with support that is consistent, relational, and culturally anchored — and with steps small enough to be real.
“The biology that carried the wound can also carry the healing — when the conditions change, and when the change is sustained.”
The Real Answer — and the Hope
So — why are so many Tamariki not with their Māma and Pāpā?
Sometimes it is because safety was compromised in the home. Often it is because trauma was already at work long before that day — shaping biology, relationships, and capacity.
Sometimes it is because systems respond to harm after it is entrenched, rather than resourcing whānau before a crisis.
But the cycle is not fixed. Cultural continuity is protective — a strong cultural connection, identity, and belonging buffer against the worst effects of trauma (Chandler & Lalonde, 1998). Iwi-led initiatives that are relational and culturally grounded show genuine results.
Science increasingly affirms what Indigenous frameworks have long held: healing becomes possible when people are held in safe relationships and supported throughout their lives.
The wound has a whakapapa. So does the healing.
From plastic windows to glass. From disconnection to reconnection. From survival to a stairway.
That is what Te Poutama o te Ora was built on.