School should always be a safe place for our children and their educators, but the truth is, we know that isn’t always the case. There is so much that is out of our control during the school day. And in a time when we feel like we *need* to have all the answers for our kids, it’s important to remember that sometimes, we don’t–especially when it comes to their feelings of safety in school. Sometimes we don’t know the best ways to reassure them that they are safe, and that’s a scary thing to navigate as a parent.
Our kids are aware of a lot more than we may realize, especially as they get older. We may be finding ourselves needing to have deeper conversations with our kids about their safety in school and/or current events. Today, Albiona from The Parenting Post is sharing advice on how to talk with our kids about this heavy and important topic.
How do I talk to my kids about safety in school?
Most of our kids have done an active shooter drill, and that’s from kindergarten all the way up to high school. It might look different or be explained differently when they’re younger as compared to when they’re older. But either way, our kids are experiencing it and most likely having conversations about it in class–rightfully so, they may be feeling afraid. So, how do we navigate this with them as parents?
Try to limit the news in the house.
The first thing you can do is to limit the news in the house. I know this is hard because a lot of parents feel the need to watch the news to catch up on current events. But if you can really be mindful in making sure your kids are not around when you’re watching the news, that’s an important thing to do.
As an adult, you can watch the news and filter it and process it in a way that’s much different than a child or even a teenager. Your child can hear some of these sensationalized headlines and those can really stick with them, and then they’re really not able to process it in the same way. So we want to do that first and foremost: limit the media that’s on and around them.
Create a space for open conversation.
The next thing you want to do is create an open space for conversation so that they can ask you any question and understand that sometimes, your answer is going to be, “I don’t know. And I’m frustrated too.” You can admit that things feel scary to you too at times. It’s so important that you are comfortable saying, “I don’t know,” because there are moments where we truly don’t have the answer. We just don’t know why things happen sometimes.
You can also talk with your kids about ways that their school is keeping them and their classmates safe. You can bring up specific examples from their school, or talk about things that happened in your own school growing up. Many schools will send home materials or ways to have conversations around this. A great way to be able to navigate these conversations is to use similar language to what the school is using. And remember this: the younger the child, the harder it is for them to grasp what’s happening; the older the child, the more they’re going to think about it.
For our highly sensitive kiddos, you want to think about ways you can take them from feeling stuck in the feelings, and moving it into action.
A lot of times this might look like writing letters to people who could help us with this problem, like lawmakers or the local police department. Or maybe, if you know of kids in a school where this happened, they could write a letter letting them know that they’re thinking of and supporting them. You want to turn it into some type of tangible action–a way to take their pain and channel into service.
Talk about kindness to others.
Lastly, use this opportunity to talk about kindness to others without highlighting any kind of real sense of violence. We know that a lot of these current events included students who felt completely isolated–even bullied in some cases. We certainly want our kids to have an awareness around who in class needs a pal or someone to play with at recess. And also, we want to help our kids know who to talk to at school if they do have concerns about a classmate or situation. How can we make sure that everybody’s being kind to everybody? Who can you turn to if you are seeing kids who are mistreating others, and how can that be handled? Those are some really important places to start.
We don’t always know why or have the answers, and you’ll get more and more comfortable saying that as time goes on. But together with your kids, you’ll come up with really good solutions that will help everyone to feel a little better about their safety in school.
