How can family professionals help Dads help their kids when sad and horrible things are going on in the world around us?
In today’s New York Times, columnist Judith Warner describes (with great honesty, I think) the dilemmas she faces in talking about bad news (terrorism in Mumbai, the Black Friday trampling death @ Wal Mart) with her children.
She raises an especially Gordian problem—how do we respond when one of our children has an ongoing fascination with bad news, how bad things happen, what they look like, and why bad things happen.
Good parenting suggests that you “confirm for your child what he thinks he’s already observing,” as one expert told the Wall Street Journal.
Fathers in particular face the challenge of how to keep learning to know their child or stepchild as the individual she is. Men in our culture grow up without great emotional literacy or emotional communication skills.
That makes it important for family professionals to coach and encourage Dads in how to listen and learn about each of their children. With those skills—especially amidst bad news in the outside world—Dads can do a lot best to respond to that individual with comfort, appropriate knowledge—and hope.
Please use the comment function to share your experiences with explaining bad news to your children—what seemed to work well and what didn’t. Other parents will benefit from your insight.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment