Giving Comfort To Your Kids In These Very Scary Times

 I don't know about you, but it seems every day brings some new terrifying event; school shootings, hurricanes, tornados, train derailments, fires, mass shootings, political decisions that affect the very way we live our lives, and of course let's not forget a pandemic that has taken over our lives for the last 3 years!  Sometimes it just feels like too much. Not to mention our own life crises. At least we as adults have years of life living as adults, so that we have a long term perspective on how to cope. Your teens do not have the benefit of experience. They haven't lived long enough to really accumulate the understanding that bad things often have a way of resolving, or that you know at least your feelings do.

Last week while teaching my college course on human development I asked my 60 students for a raise of their hands of who doesn't feel safe in this world. To my absolute astonishment, almost every hand went up! I guess in my own naïveté, I expected a few hands to go up, but not every hand. I asked what they do to feel safe. The young women who make up the majority of my two classes opened up their purses to show me their pepper spray, their key chains with alarms, and how they hold a key between their fore and middle fingers WHENEVER they are walking in case someone tries to attack them so they can poke them in the eye. 

This is not the world I grew into adulthood in. I felt free to go anywhere, do anything, take risks, leave home joyously, and use this stage of life to enjoy freedom, mostly from parents and other authority figures. That's what adolescence is all about. In our world, independence is a scary word. The safety of home, and I mean absolute emotional and physical safety, for these kids, means home. I asked my students if this lack of feeling safe contributes to the decisions they make about their life. And they universally said it absolutely does. I had noticed over the last few years how most of my students are extremely connected to their homes and families, in a way I had never see in over 30 years of college teaching. I see students going home most weekends, and choosing to stay very close to home as graduation plans are being made.

This is all to say, that your kids are living in a world in which fear and anxiety live with them every day. I literally cried on my way home after teaching, feeling so sad that these kids, and from what I am reading, most kids are living this life of fear and anxiety. 

Have you ever been in the midst of a really stressful situation that you know has no easy solution, and you call your best friend/mother/father/husband/wife knowing that just hearing their voice will make you feel better. Turns out that in fact a calming voice actually effects your body's hormonal stress responses in a positive way. In a recent study of teens, scientists wanted to see which form of communication with moms (sorry dads you were left out of this study) would help their teen feel better. After having exposed teens to a stressful situation, each teen was exposed to a different form of communication support from their moms; interaction in person, interaction over the phone, interaction over the computer/texts, or no interaction at all. Girls who experienced in person, or over the phone communication, in other words, an actual human voice showed a marked reduction in stress hormones. Those whose moms e-mailed, or sent texts showed stress hormone levels that were just as high as if the teens had had no interaction at all.

Why does this matter, because there is no substitution for human interaction. Texting, and e-mailing are good for sharing information, but when it comes to really impacting someone's life, you actually have to say something. Often times parents will tell me that most of their communication is coming in the form of texting to their kids, even when they are in the same house! Fearful of simple conversations turning into arguments, parents are resorting to  R U OK sent as a text.

Unfortunately, we live in a world now where scary things happen on a daily basis. It's always a good thing to acknowledge, with your kids these events. Believe me, they already know about them! They may be thinking but not talking about them. You might say " oh that shooting at Michigan state was so terrible, or that shooting of college students in Idaho so terrifying, how are you feeling about them?  So when you sense that your teen is feeling (there is just no substitute for parent intuition) is stressed by situations ,real or imagined. and expectations both socially and academically, you can safely assume your teen will need to hear your voice. They don't need you to solve their problems, they just need you to know that they have them. If they seem a little sad, lost, and anxious rather than asking "what's wrong?", maybe just a hug and a "you seem a little overwhelmed, anxious,sad,  just want to say I love you." That calm and loving voice can go a long way to make them feel just a little better. The science says so!