Now’s the time to talk
The pandemic is a chance to connect with kids
As we enter another week of quarantine, both adults and children are exhausted from months of coping with fear, uncertainty and devastating news. Yet these same challenges — and extra time with one another — also provide parents with openings to talk about critical topics such as racial injustice and inequity, money and privilege, grief and loss, sexuality and healthy relationships, and values and meaning. Here’s how the experts recommend framing these issues and keeping the conversation going.
RACIAL INJUSTICE AND INEQUITY
As children witness the outpouring of pain after the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, they need adults to help them make sense of the unrest, says Baruti Kafele, a social justice educator and author of The Assistant Principal 50: Critical Questions for Meaningful Leadership and Professional Growth.
That conversation is going to look different in Black and white households, says Kafele, who is Black. When he trains educators, he’ll say: “Raise your hand if you feel the need to have ongoing conversations with your children about what to do if stopped by a police officer.” Invariably, “the Black hands go up, or the white ones with Black children.” He then explains that parents of Black kids can’t opt out of these conversations. “I don’t want my son to get pulled over and lose his life over a broken tail light.”
MONEY AND PRIVILEGE
“What’s unique about this (pandemic) is that just about everybody is having things that used to be normal stripped away from their day-to-day existence,” says journalist Ron Lieber, author of The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous and Smart About Money.
So this is an important time to talk about the difference between wants and needs, and to prompt your child to consider how much is enough. “The conversation will feel more real than before the pandemic, particularly for affluent kids who have everything they need and nearly everything they want,” he says. “There are things we can’t have now at any price.” Prompt your child to think about items or experiences they miss, and then ask: “What does that tell you? What do those things cost?”
GRIEF AND LOSS
“The right time to teach children about loss is when loss occurs, and there’s a lot of loss occurring right now,” says David Kessler, author of Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief and founder of grief. com. “There are micro and macro losses. Grandpa dying is a big loss, but your kids not being able to have graduation or go to school and camp also are losses. There’s no judgment or comparing in loss.”
“We all have to learn disappointment, but usually it’s titrated in small doses. I didn’t get invited to the party or onto the select team,” says psychologist Madeline Levine, author of Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World. “The amount of disappointment these kids are absorbing is very high.”
Take time to process your own losses and understand grief, Kessler says. If your child is crying because their baseball team can’t practice, don’t say: “You don’t want to get sick, do you?” That invalidates their loss. Say, “Yes, it’s disappointing,” and explain that feeling sad is a normal reaction to grief. “A feeling only lasts for a few moments, but when we suppress it, we have all these half-felt emotions that never get expressed, and then the day comes when you need to find your emotions and don’t know how,” he says.
SEXUALITY AND HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS
Social distancing means kids have to connect in new ways, and you can use that to talk about their relationships. Ask: “What do you need from your friends right now? How can you support them?”
Your child is also spending more time with you, which means you may be watching the same shows or reading the same books. These shared experiences can provide natural segues to talk about relationships.
“It’s more fun for all involved when you can get into important topics by way of a favourite character,” says Marisa Nightingale, media adviser at Power to Decide, an organization that gives young people accurate sexual health information. She notes that a show such as Black-ish “dives right into social issues, relationship dynamics and the importance of honest communication.” You can ask: “What would you do if you were in that character’s shoes?”
VALUES AND MEANING
The pandemic has upended school as we know it. It’s a paradigm shift “that could broaden notions of what values go into a good, meaningful life,” Levine says. “We’ve had this incredibly limited view of success that’s so much about performance, but there’s this other set of skills that have been neglected, and I think that conversation is about values.”
“The disruption can be positive if parents are willing to get curious about who their kids are,” says Debbie Reber, founder of tiltparenting.com and author of Differently Wired: Raising an Exceptional Child in a Conventional World. “So many of our kids have strengths that have been overlooked. What matters is our kids understanding what they need to become self-actualized adults who can contribute their gifts, because they all have gifts. Maybe that’s an easier sell now.”
Ask questions such as: “What mattered to you this week? Why was that important to you?” Levine says. Then answer the same questions, sharing any disappointments and how you regrouped.