Talking to the Kids

I’m old. It’s true, as moms of young kiddos go, I’m on the old side and I get stuck in this place sometimes where I romanticize about providing my children with the same wholesome upbringing I had (even though I didn’t ACTUALLY have that). In my vision, they have an easy school experience, and come home and hang out and watch TV because screen time isn’t the evil spawn of satan in my fantasy that our pediatrician makes it out to be.

Our oldest is six. I never thought to talk to him about scary stuff, like active shooters, and I don’t know what he’s heard at school, but we’re readying ourselves to at least find out where he stands. He’s not had active-shooter drills yet. We haven’t gone in any depth into why strangers can be dangerous, but he knows they can be. I know we need to talk now though.

Yesterday, he asked me if his name could be sewn onto his backpack, and I explained to him that a stranger could pretend they know him if they know his name, and he might think he knows them back, so that would be a safety concern. He relayed the information immediately to his four-year-old brother who had no clue what he was talking about and he sounded sad about it, even afraid. I realized that our talks about safety also need to include the fact that we don’t need to be afraid of everything, but we need to do our best to be as safe as we can.

We didn’t really have school shooters when I was a kid, a shooter in the school may have been in the dark-recesses of my nightmare, but it was never a tangible concept. It IS a real threat for kids today, a threat that increases year-over-year. The disparity between rich and poor grows year-over-year, college more expensive, homes more unattainable, pandemics more frequent, food more expensive… the most stagnant thing they can count on today is wages… these will be talks for high school juniors and seniors, not for today, thankfully.

Burying my head doesn’t change their reality though, and I know we need to have more talks, and have better planning for all eventualities. I’ve come up with questions to initiate conversation with the kiddos, questions that should work for small kiddos and the teenage-sized ones as well.

What have you heard?

How does this make you feel?

What do you want to know?

Is there something we can do to prepare for a best outcome?

My job is to give them the ability to process hard truths in a healthy way as much as it is to feed them. I need to do this with sensitivity and in an empowering way. Active shooter drills are proven to be traumatic for kids, and gun legislation will never (in my opinion) be enough to protect our children from getting shot, because guns are hierarchically in a better position than children in the United States. I won’t use those words when I tell my kids, but I can talk to them and prepare them better by letting them know drills are just drills. Very few fires for the number of fire drills, they’re just something we do.

I want my children to live without huge fears, but sending them out into the world with rose-colored glasses just sets them up for a brutal reality. And by talking with them, I show them talking things out feels better than holding stuff inside.

I grew up with paralyzing anxiety that I never spoke about. My mother is a therapist, but at home we did not talk about mental health. My mother was hands off, and unapproachable. I grew up sterilizing my home as a coping mechanism, and the anxiety didn’t go anywhere until I met people that spoke openly about their feelings. Full-disclosure, I felt creeped out by people sharing personal information and without punch lines, and it took getting used to, but I’m grateful for open people and I want my children to have the mental health benefits of talking through sadness, trauma, fears.

Another benefit of talking to your kids is that you can fill them to the brim with FACTUAL information! There’s so much bullshit online… I’ve heard people online quote youtube channels… its very upsetting. I hope schools teach kids how to source information, but I also KNOW that I can teach them. Having talks, finding credible sources… these are how we approach issues realistically.

I don’t know the future, but I know we can cope with a lot and prepare our children to deal with scary things by knowing they’re not alone. They know they can talk to me… well, the six-year-old does… and that’s where we begin.