How to Answer Your Child's Tough Questions
Sept. 4, 2003 -- Most parents find themselves wondering how the world their kids are growing up in became so different from the one they came of age in.
Some parents have a hard time offering answers to questions like "Why do some people want to hurt us?" "What is anthrax?" and "Am I safe at school?"
TV journalist Willow Bay decided she would try to find out these answers for her own two sons and share them with parents. In writing Talking to Your Kids in Tough Times: How to Answer Your Child's Questions About the World We Live In, Bay interviewed a host of experts in the fields of child psychology and development, and collected the most frequently asked questions from kids ages three to nine.
Read an excerpt from her book below.
Children's Fears Big and Small
Why Parents Panic
IF YOU WERE DESIGNING a world in which it was easy to raise kids, you wouldn't pick the one we're living in here in America. If you wanted certain material advantages you'd pick this one, but if you were trying to make it easy on parents you wouldn't."
When I heard Robert Evans, a clinical and organizational psychologist and director of the Human Relations Service in Wellesley, Massachusetts, say this, I felt a sense of relief. No, it's not just my imagination, being a parent is harder than it used to be. Raising children is challenging, exciting, and rewarding. It has always been that way. But these days it has become an increasingly complicated and nerve-wracking task.
It's clear parents are shaken by the world we live in — and the world our children will grow up in. We're often startled by the questions our children are posing and many of us are struggling to find the "right" answers. And it leaves me wondering: Why is this so hard? Is it a problem that's unique to this generation of parents — a sign of the times we live in? Are we missing skills that our parents had? Do we need new parenting skills for these new times?
WE LIVE IN SAFE TIMES THAT FEEL SCARY
We are the safest nation in the world, living in the safest times in our history. Nevertheless, these safe times often feel very frightening. It doesn't seem to make sense. Statistically speaking we live longer, healthier, more protected lives than ever. Our life expectancy, for example, has risen considerably in the last decade alone. Scientific and technological breakthroughs have reduced risk in nearly every area of life. Yet, one of the consequences of the information age is that we contend with a tidal wave of information about potential danger —— from scientists, the media, and even our own government. We consume a near daily media diet of warnings of danger. There are scores of new products designed to keep us safe, but also myriad product liability lawsuits to compensate us for injury. Remember the hot McDonald's coffee? Who knew we were in grave danger from the contents of a styrofoam cup? Similarly, the medical community trumpets breakthrough cures for illness even as it uncovers new diseases. Is it any wonder we're anxious?
As if all of that were not enough to keep us on edge, we have the all-too-real memories of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. September 11 shook this nation to its core. We now have new color-coded security alerts from the Department of Homeland Security that will warn us of the level of risk from a terrorist attack. Operation Iraqi Freedom, as brief as it was, also raised new fears that involved bioterrorism or chemical attacks. And this country, vowing never to be caught off guard again, remains on alert for additional terrorist attacks-biological, chemical, or nuclear. We are facing new threats as a nation. And we are facing new demands as parents.
NEW THREATS FOR NEW TIMES
Of course each generation faces its own set of dangers and has to deal with them. I didn't do "drop and cover" drills in school as did children of the Cold War era. And while I'm sure that my parents tried to shield me from news reports about the Vietnam War, those reports came neatly packaged on the nightly news. They were not available in real time, live from the battlefield twenty-four hours a day. "Even during other wars," says Diane Levin, author of Teaching Young Children in Violent Times: Building a Peaceable Classroom, "the media was not such a presence in family life and childhood. It was not constantly bombarding us."
Memories from our childhood, and the parenting we received (back in the days when it was called raising children), guide us when we raise our own children. We act on instinct shaped partly by those early memories. At times, we do as our parents did. (How many times have you said to yourself, "I can't believe I said that. I sound just like my mother!") And at times, when we have unpleasant or unhappy memories about the parenting we received, we intentionally do just the opposite. "You use a lot of your own experience as a child that's just kind of embedded in your consciousness or subconsciousness," Levin explains, "but here we have a whole new set of threats to our safety and the safety of our children to contend with. This is a place where parents have not had anything in their past to help them deal with it, so they don't have anything embedded in their prior experience." In the case of some of the new twenty-first-century threats we are facing, we simply do not have the guideposts from our own childhood to show us the way.
More than a lack of guideposts, we no longer have a road map. Increasingly, in this country, we create our own path through life, no longer following the one our parents took. Evans offers this explanation: "It's harder to raise children than it ever was because most of what we associate with advances in American life is actually making it harder to know how to raise kids. Most of the world lived, and still does, in settings where there are relatively few choices for a child's life, and therefore there is a high level of certainty for the adults raising him or her.
In a primitive fishing villagd — the men fish, the women dry fish — you have a son or daughter and you know what they have to learn. There's no choice of a career but there is high certainty of parenting. We flip that around. Any kid in America should be able to become anything and live any lifestyle — freedom is high, but consequently the predictability for an adult is very low. And the world keeps changing — just five years ago if you had a kid in college who was heading into high tech, you'd have been very happy, because you would have had no idea that the technology sector was going to crash, that the companies were going to go bust, and there'd be a 25 percent vacancy rate in the San Francisco Bay area." Similarly, just five years ago who would have imagined a toddler talking about planes crashing into buildings real planes? Or having to sign permission slips allowing your child's school to give her potassium iodide tablets in the event of nuclear fallout from a terrorist attack? Or watching a security guard search your child's backpack at a Yankee game? Just as our world is changing, so are our families, and our neighborhoods — two of the anchors we rely on as parents. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, seven out of ten women with children under age eighteen worked outside the home in 2001. More and more parents leave children with caretakers, nannies, relatives, or in daycare. Increasingly, our neighbors do the same. "There's nobody left to do the homemaking — I don't mean that in an Ozzie and Harriet sense, I mean to make the house a home. I don't care who does it or how they do it together, but we have fewer places where that happens," Evans notes. He adds, "We have people reinventing the wheel because nobody lives in a neighborhood anymore — even if they're fairly close to another house. We don't live in places where if I see your kid misbehaving outside my house, I go speak to you. And I can't count on you to do the same if my kid's misbehaving. So we're each left more alone to do this, more on our own. It's hard to know how to parent kids."
CRISIS OF COMPETENCE
The time we spend on our careers enriches us intellectually, socially, emotionally, and financially. But we do spend less time with our children, and as a result we are less familiar with the world of our children. And often, we are less comfortable in that world. It has been a gradual change that Evans says teachers began noticing years ago. "I worked with a lot of preschool teachers, and when they have parents come in for a day to play with the kids, there are a lot more parents who have a hard time just playing with the kids. They can teach them something, they can coach them, but they can't just sit at the dollhouse and play with them comfortably. So while the career sophistication we have gained is really remarkable, it has come with a certain price in terms of child rearing savvy." What happens in times of crisis, and in times that are troubling, is that parents are far less sure of themselves, less confident in their abilities as parents. And as Evans points out, in many cases we have much less experience on the playground or the playroom floor. Evans' diagnosis?
"There's no question in my mind that there's an epidemic among parents — a crisis of confidence and competence." In addition to the fact that the world we are raising our children in is very different from the one in which we grew up, there are some universal truths about parents that make parenting today more difficult. For the most part, as parents we want to control the world our children live in. We want to protect our children from harm and we also want to protect them from feelings that are uncomfortable, frightening, or difficult. When we're faced with questions that tug at our hearts or give us knots in our stomachs, we want to make those feelings disappear. This has always been true of parents.
In the face of all this — the uncertainty of a rapidly changing environment, new threats for which we have no precedent, the absence of familiar anchors of generations past, less familiarity with the world of children — is it any wonder that we sometimes panic when our child asks a question about one of these "new" threats? Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist and author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, offers another sign of a lack of confidence: "We want experts for everything. We want experts for psychotherapy to fix our children. We want the very best art teacher and the best math curriculum and the best reading program in school. And then we want the best answers to children's questions about war and drugs." Of course we do. We want the answers and we'd like them quickly. Expediency and efficiency are signs of the times, right?
Parents are eager for help, even for someone else to tell them what to do to be a good parent. And that's exploited in many ways in our culture. "Just look at how toys are marketed," says Levin. "You can buy this crib toy for your six-month-old. The baby can push a button and the toy recites the letters of the alphabet. You'll give him a head start, and help your child learn to read. And what parent wouldn't think, 'I want to give my kid a head start?' But the reality is that toy could actually undermine your child's learning to read. At this age babies benefit from interacting with the real physical world. It's a foundation for all future learning." Pushing those buttons is a meaningless activity at this age. We want to raise our children to be problem solvers rather than button pushers.
Parents have an understandable, even commendable desire to "get it right." And when a child comes to us with a question that makes her frightened, worried, and anxious we are even more determined to make sure we get the right answer. "Parents are so afraid they're going to make a mistake if they talk to children about important issues," explains Mogel. "But the fact is that kids' knowing that you're there to talk to them is probably more important than anything else."
As a parent you will be faced with a lifetime of questions — and some of them will be troubling. You'll come up with answers — lots of right ones and probably a few wrong ones. But it's establishing the process that's important, and that's what this books aims to accomplish for you. Every expert I've spoken with has said you can always go back and try it again, and say to your child, "You know, I've thought about it a bit more . . ." Parents don't always have to have the right answer right off the bat.
Children are extremely resilient. They need to know we are there to listen. They need to know they have a comfortable and safe place to go with their feelings and questions. They need to know we are available to go there with them. Children have always needed these things. But in today's world where adult concerns invade the lives of children, they need it even more. Parents today need to work a little harder to help our children navigate the world they live in and to create a safe, comfortable place in which they can ask us all sorts of questions. Kids do not need perfect answers, but they do need a parent giving them some answers.
So while I'll offer plenty of advice to help you understand your child's fears and your own, I'll also offer plenty of techniques you can use to encourage conversation. I hope you'll take a deep breath, relax, and learn to enjoy this very meaningful and very rewarding part of parenting. It is hard, but the important things in life usually are.
Our children will in all likelihood be facing a whole new set of issues as parents. They'll be asking us how we survived what we did in much the same way we asked those questions of our parents. Think of how often we've joked about the childhood dangers we lived through. How did we turn out okay when our mothers smoked and drank during their pregnancy? As we consider the merits of car seats with the new "latch system" or the ever so crucial five-point harness, we should remember that when we were little, we didn't wear seat belts, we sat in the front seat or we climbed all over the back, often with a bunch of other kids and the family dog. And look, we made it! We survived. Despite the challenges we face it appears we are thriving. And the reality is, despite the larger threats against us, so will our children.
Copyright © 2003 by Willow Bay