When Things Arent’s OK, How Do You Tell Your Kids?
STORY BY Heather Kirk-Davidoff ILLUSTRATION BY Melissa Carstensen
“Why do we always tell our kids that everything will be all right?” a friend of mine asked me a while back. “We don’t know any such thing. Why 
should we say it to our kids?”
Her question startled me. Isn’t this reassurance part of a parent’s job description? We’re supposed to quiet our children’s anxiety, not join in with it, right? My friend agreed but added, “Lying to a child is not reassuring. They know we’re being fake – and I think that makes them more anxious than if we were honest about our concerns for the world.”
My friend’s comments spoke to one of my biggest parenting challenges. How honest should I be about things that scare or worry me? I don’t want my kids to grow up without a clue about what the real world is like. But I have often worried that telling them the truth about the world would overwhelm them with anxiety. Many times I’ve wished for a cave somewhere to hide until the world comes to its senses. Couldn’t I at least provide that refuge for my children?
My kids were in preschool and kindergarten on September 11th, 2001. I remember my mix of emotions as I waited for the school bus that afternoon. I wanted desperately to hold my children and tell them how much I love them. And yet I didn’t want to alarm them. I had to acknowledge that something bad had happened – they were going to find out, and better they find out from me. But I had to somehow stay calm while I told them. It wasn’t easy, since I was feeling pretty scared myself.
That was the first time I remember struggling to find a way to tell my kids that things are both OK and not OK. It wasn’t the last.
My husband’s mom got sick when my kids were in elementary school – old enough to know that something was wrong when my husband started making frequent trips to New York to visit her in the hospital. We gave them enough information about what was happening that they weren’t blindsided when, about six months later, she died.
When I noticed, years later, that one of my kids seemed particularly anxious about sickness and disease, I started to second-guess myself. Had I given them too much information too early? I wanted to tell them that disease and death are part of life. Had I let them come a little too close?
An older friend told me a story that offered some reassurance. “When I was 13,” she said, “my mother was very sick. She eventually got the treatment she needed and she recovered, but there was a time when she was very close to death. My father talked to me about what was going on. It was scary, but I was also relieved to know that he was willing to be honest with me.” Perhaps our children’s sense of safety and security is founded on trust in the adults in their lives, not on their belief that the world is perfectly safe and secure.
If we can figure out ways to speak clearly and calmly about scary things, our children will become more confident emotionally – and more savvy politically. They won’t believe politicians who tell stories similar to those parents tell their toddlers: that we are protected and nothing bad is going to happen.
So, I’m going to get to work on having honest, non-anxious conversations with my children about every negative issue that comes our way, including the ones that make me supremely anxious. But isn’t there something to be said for putting on a brave face now and then?
I’m thinking, for example, of September 11, 2001. That afternoon, after I picked my kids up from the school bus, I sat them down and explained that some bad people had flown an airplane into a building and a lot of people had died. They listened, asked a question or two and then wanted a Popsicle. Then they wanted to go play outside. A part of me was a little miffed that they weren’t more upset — but mostly I was relieved. I went to the playground with them and pushed them on the swings and laughed when they made goofy faces at each other. Turns out, that was exactly what I needed to do. They gave me the strength I needed at that moment.
My kids – especially when they were little, but even now that they are nearly grown – need me to love and care for them whether I feel up to it on any given day or not. And that’s one of the main reasons why I know that everything will be all right.
Heather Kirk-Davidoff is the enabling minister of the Kittamaqundi Community Church in Columbia. She and her husband, Dan, are the parents of three biological children and an adult foster daughter.
