If you tut and say: ‘Don’t bring me stuff you’ve seen on social media,’ you’ve lost your chance.”Īnd with anxiety-prone children, Gilmour says it’s all in your delivery. “It might be accurate, but it’s important to give them the skills of critical evaluation. With younger children, you could watch BBC Newsround together if teenagers mention something they have seen on social media, don’t scoff but suggest looking at it with them. Other children might want to know about safety, like: ‘Am I going to be OK?’” “My first question would be: ‘What do you want to know?’ not: ‘What are you worried about?’ Older children might be interested in facts, like what does a sanction mean. She also recommends parents establish what children have already heard and pitch things accordingly. “I’d stick to general statements: ‘Yes, this is a concerning issue, but the countries are working together to figure out what to do.’ Note that day-to-day life in the UK is going to be the same as it ever was.” On questions parents themselves struggle with, such as whether this is the beginning of world war 3, she suggests not getting drawn into detail.
“For example, if somebody takes something that doesn’t belong to them, that’s not OK. For a young child, for example, you could use an analogy from everyday life to explain why war has broken out. “If you say something that’s not true to your child it may harm their sense of trust, and when we’re in this period of time when things are feeling unstable then keeping a sense of stability is exactly what they need.”īut being honest, she stresses, doesn’t mean telling them everything you might know.
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It’s hard being a parent right now.”ĭr Jane Gilmour, a consultant clinical psychologist and author of the book How to Have Incredible Conversations with Your Child, recommends honesty. But I worry that after two years of pandemic stuff, we’re straight into even more scary stuff. “I learned then never to reassure when I couldn’t be sure. While it’s all speculation, I am not putting that on them.”īut Julia, a mother of three teenagers aged 19, 17 and 14, regrets reassuring them when the virus first emerged in China that it was nothing to worry about within weeks the boys were in lockdown, and their grandmother had died in a nursing home. If something terrible does happen, I’ll deal with it as and when. “We told them we’d all be fine and not to worry during Covid, which we all were. “I’m a firm believer in lying to the children,” says Liz, a writer and parent of three children aged 12, 14 and 16. School-gate chat revolves around whether to turn off the radio, and how to reassure children still reeling from lockdown that life isn’t about to turn upside down again. On Mumsnet, a mother questioning whether her daughter’s year 3 teachers should have talked to the class about Ukrainians “having to leave the country with their pets for fear of being shot by Russians”, triggered a lengthy debate (the consensus was that it was already the talk of the playground).
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While British children’s anxieties pale in comparison with what their Ukrainian peers are suffering under bombardment from Russian rockets, a pandemic that led to rising mental health problems among young people has left many parents wondering about the impact of living through seemingly apocalyptic times.īooks on helping children manage their emotions, from the TV presenter Ant Middleton’s Mission Total Resilience, to Tom and Joe Brassington’s picture book Bottled, are shooting up Amazon rankings. A primary school teacher friend spent last week soothing pupils who were panicking that a bomb was about to drop on them another father I know was floored by questions about whether he would be called up in the event of a world war.
Over tea or on the school run, and in those raw moments just before lights out, when children often disclose what’s actually troubling them, many parents now face questions they’re struggling to answer. The family has distant relatives in the country, who have now escaped to Hungary, which he thinks has made the war “that bit more real” for them.
Now, he’s the one digging out maps to show nine-year-old Izzy where Ukraine is. He still remembers deciding that in the event of war, he would climb some high ground near his house to watch for incoming missiles.
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