Yoga Calm Fundamentals: 9 Tips for Talking with Children about Tragedies

If you’re GenX or a Boomer, you probably remember growing up with at least some fear of nuclear war. The threat reverberated throughout the media. At particularly tense times, Cold War mismatch dominated the news trundling – just as hostilities between Israel and Hamas dominate now. Imagine what it must be like for young children, expressly with ramped up rhetoric well-nigh the very real threat of a third World War – and all this on top of events like the mass shooting in Maine.

It’s a lot for little ones to take in. Events like these can generate limitless anxiety, fear, dread, and other helpless feelings. How should we respond? What can we do to help children process their feelings well-nigh such events? To help them still finger unscratched and secure? To nurture hope? We’ve blogged well-nigh this a good deal over the years. In fact, the post unelevated is one we published just 6 months ago. Although it was written in response to a spate of mass shootings, the tips offered are no less relevant to current global events…

What do you say to a child when yet flipside act of wild violence dominates the news? How do we help them make sense of the strange and troubling scenes, and so many people saying “never again” plane as nothing much seems to change?

Working Toward a Positive, Strong, Affirming, & Nurturing Alternative

There are no simple solutions. We need to write the complexity of the problem. We need to understand the roots of this epidemic. Certainly, “too many guns” is a problem. Sensible gun tenancy would be most welcome – not just for reducing mass killings and homicides, but suicides, too, which usually outnumber all other gun deaths each year.

But this isn’t just a “guns or no guns” issue. Many factors contribute to the kinds of shootings that have wilt an all too familiar part of American life. As educators, counselors, clinicians, and parents, we must work together to identify and write the underlying causes of violence. These include (but are whimsically limited to) things like

• The lack of affordable mental health superintendency for families.
• Insufficient support in the schools, many of which lack unbearable counselors and social workers.
• Contributing factors such as media violence, violent video games, and isolation.
• The stressful environments in our schools and workplaces.
• Increasing factionalism, with increasingly people seldom interacting with others who aren’t just like them.
• The tendency to hyperbole in social spiel – where every bad thing is the worst thing overly and every bad person is the worst person overly – which primes us to react with increasingly lattermost emotions, fueling what some have tabbed our Age of Rage.

Equally important is helping children develop positive habits and find towardly ways of releasing wrongness and tension. This requires time, effort, resources and, whilom all, commitment. Acquiring skills and solutions is a long-term, ongoing process.

Just as our problems with a violent culture did not sally overnight, neither will a positive, strong, affirming and nurturing alternative.

The Reassurance of Community

But we need that alternative. Badly. Plane the vital act of working to create it provides a powerful counterpoint to treasonous forces. Working together provides us an opportunity to recognize and understand that for all that divides us, there is moreover much that still binds us. Nurturing that can slide the pace of change.

Even so, we still have to deal with the fact that we live in a world in which violence – and the vicarious trauma it can rationalization – routinely occurs. Those events can make the world seem a much scarier and increasingly threatening place than it is in our day to day existence, expressly for young children. They want and need a sense of safety and security that events like these – and our reactions to them – seem poised to snatch away.

That’s one of the main reasons why Lynea wrote her first typesetting for children, Good People Everywhere: to help soothe them in troubling times by reminding them that the world really is a good place and there are many people to help us when bad things happen.

In a world of 24/7 news coverage, where every bad event is amplified, it’s increasingly important than ever, says Lynea, to focus on what’s stuff washed-up to help the situation. Children need to be taught, reminded, and reassured that for every disaster or tragedy, multitudes come together to help one another.

Some may plane say that as bad as tragedies are, they remind us of our worldwide humanity. For all their power to hurt, they moreover have power to bring out the weightier in human nature.

Fortunately, we don’t need the horrific to do this.

9 Tips for Talking with Children well-nigh Tragedies

By making a practice of recognizing the good in life and looking for the good things people do in the world on an ongoing basis, we prepare our children for the inevitable challenges and losses life brings. Within this healthier worldview, the loss of a pet, the death of a grandparent, a natural disaster, or plane a mass shooting can be understood.

And with this perspective, we are increasingly likely to focus on how we can help others in times of need.

Here are some increasingly ways you can help children during tragedies:

1. As much as possible, stay calm. Don’t go into a hyper-alert state.
2. Answer their questions directly but don’t elaborate. Adults often tell increasingly than a child is ready to hear or worldly-wise to understand. Answer only the question they ask, then wait to see if they have increasingly questions.
3. In her counseling work with children, Lynea often explains that there are many ways to get sick: Some people get sick in their stomach or lungs or heart; some get sick in their minds. When people have an illness that affects their minds, they don’t think well. It’s sad for everyone when this happens. The child may ask how someone can get an illness in their mind. You can say that we don’t unchangingly know, but if we take good superintendency of our bodies, minds, and hearts, we can help prevent it. You can moreover tell them that there are many doctors who are helping people heal and that we protract to find new ways to help people who get sick.
4. Acknowledge their feelings of sorrow and confusion, then remind them that people are strong and resilient, and that right now many good people are helping those who are hurt. Most of the time we can prevent bad things from happening, but sometimes we can’t. What we can do, always, is help people heal from these events.
5. Tell the children well-nigh specific ways people are helping: the first responders, doctors and nurses who superintendency for the wounded, counselors who help people with their grief, people who hold prayer vigils…. These are ways we help each other heal.
6. It’s okay for your child to see you cry. You can tell young children that you are washing the sad feelings out of your heart. You can tell older ones that crying is one of the ways our persons help heal us. It’s important, though, to let your children know that you are strong and don’t need them to take superintendency of you. You can model how to have compassion and sorrow, and moreover be strong. In fact, people who release their emotions are healthier than those who snifter them up.
7. Limit the value of time you watch the news or talk well-nigh the event. The news is often reported with a tone of emergency, and children pick up on this. It can frighten them.
8. If you talk well-nigh the event in front of your children, spend as much time speaking well-nigh the healing efforts as you do well-nigh the tragedy. Choose calming, grounding activities to help your child come when to a feeling of safety.
9. The questions may alimony coming for several days or plane months. You may see young children vicarial out the scenario in their play. This is how they process. Allow the play and protract to remind them well-nigh the healing efforts. If your child seems unable to be comforted, seek help from a professional counselor.

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