Sometimes Life (and conversations) Can Be Difficult
Do you know how sometimes your kids hear stuff in the news that you really wish they hadn’t heard? Let’s take a few minutes to talk about what we can do when that happens…
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
In 1967, the Beatles song “A Day in the Life” began with the line “I read the news today, oh boy…” Do you remember it? Listen to it here to bring back some memories.
That was a long time ago. That was a different world. We were much younger. We were much more innocent.
I read the news today, oh boy…
It seems like today, reading (or watching or downloading or subscribing to or tweeting) the news is often an invitation into some of the sadder and darker parts of the human experience. Perhaps it was always like that. I don’t remember watching the news much until I was, at least, in high school and I didn’t watch it every day or pay very much attention to it until I was in my twenties, married and living on my own. The news… was big people stuff.
I don’t watch it anymore.
Our kids get the news faster than we ever did. It comes to them on their phones, their google readers, their Itouches and IPads. They see it unfold in real time on their Facebook feed, their Tweets and even on their laptops. For good measure, just in case they missed it, their friends will text them the juiciest bits of news! It comes in unfiltered and raw, often unedited and at full force faster than we used to be able to even say “Hot off the presses”. Yup, it’s hotter than that. It comes to them so fast and so often that we, as the adults who love them, do not have the chance to decide if what they see and hear “in the news” is something that they are ready for or can even begin to understand.
I read the news today, oh boy…
All of this is just stuff we have gotten used to. We know it’s not the best thing ever, but we have come to accept that our kids will read, hear and see all of the ugliest details about Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Jon and Kate, Michael Jackson, the octomom and even poor Gary Coleman. Ever since the good old Clinton years, when even our president provided some of the most unappetizing dinner table conversation, we have come to accept that the innocence we enjoyed through childhood has been dramatically shortened by what’s “in the news”. Our kids hear and see too much, too soon.
Hopefully, we still talk to our kids about these “news items”. Just because we can not shelter them or control whether or not they are exposed to it we can not become numb to it. Hopefully we take the time to remind our kids that these are not “news items”, they are human beings. In all their brokenness, sadness and troubles, they are still children of God and need our prayers, not our judgment or ridicule. Hopefully, some of the issues these “news items” raise like addiction, promiscuity, infidelity, fame, and worse can be jumping off points for conversations with our kids about who they are, who God is and what God wants for all of us, including those “in the news”. These are important conversations and we have to be having them. Our kids need us to stay involved in it, even though we can no longer prevent it from reaching them. We can not just turn away and pretend they aren’t picking it up. Scary, I know…
I read the news today, oh boy…
So, it certainly is scary to talk about even when it is happening to or around some far off celebrity that we will never meet, or some poor family in Florida whose name we don’t even remember the next day.
How much scarier is it when we know the players?
How do we as parents handle it when we recognize the addresses and the names in the paper?
How do we have these already tough conversations when they center around people we actually know or have spent time with?
What do we say to our kids when they ask us why someone they know just got arrested or what certain words mean?
What do we do when faced with hard questions and tough conversations that we were not ready to have with our kids yet about things they probably are not ready to hear which may or may not have been done by someone they know?
What do we say when our kids come running off of the school bus yelling “guess who got arrested!”?
I do not have a simple answer. I am confused myself.
I do know that, ready or not, we have to figure out what to say and how to say it. Our kids are asking, the barn door is already open. We can not ignore it.
We need to find a way to talk about compassion, grace and forgiveness. We need to find a way to talk about being safe and careful and knowing what to do if our kids themselves are ever feeling uncomfortable with or around someone they should be able to trust. We need to be careful not to make them scared or un-trusting. We need to not introduce shame into the situation. We need to find a way to talk about how sometimes our human brokenness can drive us to do some pretty awful things. We need to find a way to talk to our kids about not gossiping. We need to talk about things like innocent until proven guilty. We need to talk about what justice looks like if people are found guilty. We need to help them learn how to care for the victims whose lives just got pretty messed up and pretty public. We might even need to define for our kids what certain terms or words or actions that they read about in the paper mean. We need to pray with our kids… We need God’s help.
This is all tricky. I am providing some links to some resources that you might find useful. I am also inviting you to call or email if you are struggling with what to do about this in your family. I know I am. Maybe, we can all help each other move faithfully through these kinds of situations when they come up. Maybe, as a community of Disciples, we can figure out what to do with stuff like this…
Links to help when life and the conversations get difficult:
Strategies for Talking and Listening
From AHA! Parenting – Tools for communication
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