ACEs Aware Quiz Results
Thank you for taking the American SPCC’s ACEs-Aware quiz to see how your history may be affecting your closest relationships today. There’s no pass or fail, and this isn’t diagnostic—there are only opportunities to grow and thrive.
Based on your score, this as your most likely result:
41–84 Points: “The Resilient Survivor”
Attachment-Informed Profile
Your relationship patterns may feel intense or exhausting at times. Trust, emotional safety, or conflict may trigger old protective responses. Nothing about this makes you broken—these are learned survival strategies.
You’ve shown tremendous resilience in continuing to seek connection.
If you’re a parent or aspire to be one, it may show up like this:
- Your child’s needs may overwhelm your nervous system at times.
- You may fear repeating patterns from your past—or work hard to avoid them.
- You might oscillate between being very protective and needing space.
- You care deeply but may struggle with guilt or worry that you’re “not doing it right.”
- You may parent with fierce love and determination, even when exhausted.
Your Next 7 Days Action Plan
Your results suggest you have experienced significant adversity, yet you have also demonstrated remarkable resilience.
This week is about honoring your strength while taking gentle steps toward healing.
1. Take a 10-Minute Daily Walk
Spend time outdoors each day.
Movement and nature can help regulate stress and support emotional well-being.
2. Reach Out to One Supportive Person
Connection is a powerful protective factor.
Send a text, make a call, or spend time with someone who makes you feel heard and supported.
3. Complete One Reflection Exercise
Spend 10–15 minutes journaling.
Choose one question:
- What helped me survive difficult times?
- What strengths have emerged from my experiences?
- What would I tell my younger self today?
Weekly Reflection
- What am I most proud of overcoming?
- What support do I need right now?
- What is one hopeful step I can take next?
Remember
Your ACE score is only one chapter of your story. Healing, growth, and resilience remain possible throughout life.
This week is just the beginning. Lasting change is built through small, consistent steps over time. We invite you to continue your journey with American SPCC’s growing library of free resources, tools, and educational content designed to help you strengthen resilience, nurture healthy relationships, and create a brighter future for yourself and those you care about.
Recommendations
Online Articles & Resources
Learn more about the major parenting styles and review our other free resources. Seek immediate help if you need it, and encourage those you know who might be engaging in problematic parenting styles to learn the risks and choose healthier options.
Book Recommendations
If you have younger children, we recommend these books:
How to Deal with Your ____ So Your Kids Don’t Have to: An Encyclopedia for Ditching Your Emotional Baggage
Are you determined to parent differently than you were raised? Ready to break cycles, heal old wounds, and give your children the emotionally close relationship you always wanted? This is your roadmap.
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Inside, You’ll Discover How to Heal From:
- Complicated emotional states like anger, anxiety, body image struggles, and jealousy
- Insecure habits such as people-pleasing, toxic comparison, blaming, and denial
- The lingering effects of insecurity or trauma from your own childhood
What You’ll Gain:
- Tools to heal yourself—so your children don’t have to carry your pain
- Strategies to build a secure, emotionally close bond with your kids
- Confidence to become the emotionally mature and reliable parent you wish you’d had
This compassionate reference guide will help you navigate the messy emotional moments of parenthood so that you can give your kids the invaluable gift of an emotionally secure parent. Start your healing journey today—for them, and for you.
Playful Parenting
Have you ever stepped back to watch what really goes on when your children play? As psychologist Lawrence J. Cohen points out, play is children’s way of exploring the world, communicating deep feelings, getting close to those they care about, working through stressful situations, and simply blowing off steam. That’s why “playful parenting” is so important and so successful in building strong, close bonds between parents and children.
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Through play we join our kids in their world–and help them to:
- Express and understand complex emotions
- Break through shyness, anger, and fear
- Empower themselves and respect diversity
- Play their way through sibling rivalry
- Cooperate without power struggles
From eliciting a giggle during baby’s first game of peekaboo to cracking jokes with a teenager while hanging out at the mall, Playful Parenting is a complete guide to using play to raise confident children. Written with love and humor, brimming with good advice and revealing anecdotes, and grounded in the latest research, this book will make you laugh even as it makes you wise in the ways of being an effective, enthusiastic parent.
Peaceful Discipline
Using best practices from healthy and connection-based parenting, improv comedy, and trauma recovery, this peaceful parenting book brings JOY back to families. These positive discipline tips can help whether you’re raising toddlers, parenting preschoolers, or supporting school-age children with love and respect. Effective for the hypersensitive child and the strong-willed child, this book offers conscious parenting guidance for solving challenges and preventing them in the first place.
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This book helps parents and caregivers:
- Understand what’s beneath children’s behaviors so they can address root causes rather than temporary “fixes” that end up backfiring
- Learn about child development in ways that are accessible and relatable
- Heal generational patterns and break unhealthy cycles
- Learn how to respond peacefully rather than react impulsively
- Teach without shaming (for the adult AND the child) so that kids will want to learn from us
Offering a balance of science, practical experience, and new perspectives, Peaceful Discipline guides parents to a lifetime of easier, deeper, and stronger relationships with their kids. – Tina Payne Bryson, PhD, New York Times best-selling author of The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline
Accessible, tender and wise, this book provides parents with actionable tips and strategies that will forge more connected and joyful relationships! – Mona Delahooke, PhD, best-selling author of Beyond Behaviors and Brain-Body Parenting
The Opposite of Worry
Whether it’s the monster in the closet or the fear that arises from new social situations, school, or sports, anxiety can be especially challenging and maddening for children. And since anxiety has a mind of its own, logic and reassurance often fail, leaving parents increasingly frustrated about how to help. Now Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D., the author of Playful Parenting, provides a special set of tools to handle childhood anxiety.
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Offering simple, effective strategies that build connection through fun, play, and empathy, Dr. Cohen helps parents
- start from a place of warmth, compassion, and understanding
- teach children the basics of the body’s “security system”: alert, alarm, assessment, and all clear.
- promote tolerance of uncertainty and discomfort by finding the balance between outright avoidance and “white-knuckling” through a fear
- find lighthearted ways to release tension in the moment, labeling stressful emotions on a child-friendly scale
- tackle their own anxieties so they can stay calm when a child is distressed
- bring children out of their anxious thoughts and into their bodies by using relaxation, breathing, writing, drawing, and playful roughhousing
With this insightful resource of easy-to-implement solutions and strategies, you and your child can experience the opposite of worry, anxiety, and fear and embrace connection, trust, and joy.
If you have tweens or teens, we recommend
How to Talk to Kids about Anything: Answering Kids’ Hard Questions with Confidence
What do you say when your child asks, “What happens when people die?” or “How does the baby get in there?” You want to be honest. You want to be accurate. And above all, you want your child to feel safe coming to you with anything.
How to Talk to Kids About Anything is the national bestseller that arms you with the words, tools, and emotional readiness to tackle life’s hardest parenting conversations―without panic.
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Created by Dr. Robyn Silverman, child development expert, mom, and host of the top-rated How to Talk to Kids About Anything podcast, this book is more than advice―it’s a lifeline. With real-world scripts, empathy-first techniques, and decades of research distilled into actionable language, you’ll finally feel prepared for the moments you used to dread.
Raising Securely Attached Kids
Hopeful and inspiring, this essential evidence-based guide shows parents, educators, and anyone with children in their lives that they are not alone in the questions and concerns they may have about raising confident, capable, and caring kids.
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Covering every parenting era from newborns to adults, Raising Securely Attached Kids teaches simple, real-life strategies that will help you:
- Move past old patterns from your childhood to become the parent or caregiver you yearn to be—no matter what you went through growing up
- Resolve past attachment traumas so you can offer a calm, connected, and secure base
- Create a secure attachment relationship with your kids by choosing connection over control
- Build and reinforce a strong foundation of trust with scripts and practical tools
- Understand that it’s never too late to create a stronger bond with your children
Very Intentional Parenting
Very Intentional Parenting: Awakening the Empowered Parent Within is a self-help book that offers a relatable, down-to-earth approach to parenting, focusing on parents improving themselves first to better connect with their children. It uses positive discipline, emotional intelligence, and real-life examples to help parents create more peaceful, collaborative, and value-driven family dynamics, moving away from fear-based or punitive methods. The book emphasizes self-awareness, healing personal wounds, and fostering open communication to build stronger parent-child relationships.
Love The Teen You Have
Love the Teen You Have is a practical guide for parents to improve their relationship with their teenagers by shifting focus from behavior to connection, using evidence-based strategies to handle conflict, ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and building essential life skills like executive functioning. This book offers actionable advice, relatable stories, and a compassionate, science-backed approach to help parents understand their teens better and foster deeper bonds, emphasizing that it’s never too late to transform the relationship.
Additional Resources for the Resilient Survivor
Getting started with connection-based parenting: multi-course pack, Showing Up Stronger, which includes three evidence-based and supportive videos with practical ways to increase the peace in your home, or get started with one free course here.
What this might look like in relationships with other adults:
- Fear of abandonment or rejection.
- Expecting conflict or criticism even when none is present.
- Shutting down, detaching, or reacting intensely when overwhelmed.
- Difficulty feeling grounded during emotional moments.
- You may hesitate to trust or rely on others.
- You may experience emotional intensity in relationships—either seeking closeness or avoiding it altogether.
- Conflict may feel unsafe, leading to withdrawal or defensiveness.
- You might fear vulnerability but also crave deep connection.
Supportive Recommendations for Non-Parenting Relationships
Practice body-based calming and mindfulness practices, seek safe relational experiences, explore self-compassion, consider professional support, and celebrate each moment of awareness—you are actively reshaping your relational patterns.We invite you to explore trusted resources like the Gottman Institute.