How do I talk to my children about war?

Explore age-appropriate strategies to help you address difficult topics and provide comfort and understanding to your children.

Transcript

00:00

As much as parents might want to protect their children from certain news, they're going to end up going to school. And they're going to have access to information.

00:07

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00:15

For very young children, such as preschool-aged children, you mostly want to help them learn

00:21

how to talk about their feelings and help them label their feelings. You don't want to necessarily give them information, but maybe even ask them,

00:28

what have you heard about it? How does it make you feel? Really, what that does is it encourages them to continue to talk about their emotions.

00:36

When it comes to a little bit older children, such as elementary school children, they might know a little bit more, but still not enough

00:43

to be able to understand what could be going on in the world. So keeping things really brief and simple, I think, is really important.

00:50

We want to make sure that these kids are still able to kind of live their lives as kids, and not have to worry about worldly or adult events

00:58

that they're just not really equipped to deal with just yet. For older children, they're probably going to be a lot more exposed to various media

01:07

or social media or maybe having their friends talk about it. So I think it's most helpful to ask older children open-ended questions about what they understand

01:16

about the conflicts, or how they feel about it where they're getting their information from, so that parents can teach them

01:23

about responsible consumption and also, you know, being able to discuss what it looks like to have

01:29

a healthy relationship with social media and with the news as well. It's also really important for parents to be able to be accessible to their children

01:36

so that their children know that they can come and ask them questions every time something scares them or something doesn't really make sense to them.