Tag: Children

Parenting in Times of Crisis

Parents and caregivers have often been led to focus on the more tangible aspects of raising children – teaching them how to get dressed, helping them with homework, and providing them with a well-balanced diet. But what the current health crisis lays bare is that one of our primary responsibilities, as adults with young people, is to help them navigate times of stress and potential trauma.

So while the tempo of our country encourages us to work & homeschool & keep on keeping on, even as we watch the numbers of affected rise and our concerns rise in tandem, what may be most helpful is to stop. Stop and ask ourselves: What do we need, and how can we best provide it? What have our past responses been to trauma, and how is that influencing us now? How can we model for our children how to process this and get through difficult times?

For many of us, stopping to tune in during times of stress can be scary. We may be consumed by the realization of how overwhelming or frightening a situation truly is. And still, it is difficult to come up with a plan that truly addresses what is in front of us if we are intent on ignoring it. Acknowledging what is going on and how it is affecting us allows us the space to find out what can get us through it.

Whether you’re thinking about these things on your own, or having conversations with partners, family members, and other caregivers, here are some things to think about:

• How do our past patterns around trauma influence this moment? People might assume that trauma history has a negative effect – which is not necessarily the case! Trauma histories can sometimes give us perspective that comes from surviving other difficult times and knowing it is possible to make it through again. Trauma can also teach us skills like compartmentalization that allow us to simultaneously be aware of how challenging a situation is while still finding ways to function. There are a lot of strengths we can gain through negative experiences. Of course, there are learned behaviors and coping mechanisms associated with trauma that may not serve us or those around us as well. Do we tend toward denial of the situation or of our feelings? Do we struggle with loss of control when an issue feels immense? Do we find ourselves more irritable with those around us because it feels like an easier conflict to take on? It’s important to remember that the behaviors we learned in the past to survive and cope don’t always serve us – so we need to check in with ourselves.

• What is within our realm of control right now? We do not have a responsibility (or ability) to affect this entire pandemic, but how can we feel good that we are doing our part? And how can we feel confident that we are doing the best for the health of our family, not just physically but also emotionally? An explicit focus on our mental health and our family’s mental health leads us to different choices than when we are focusing on work and school. Work and school are important, but as this escalates, our families and communities will NEED our mental health and well being. It is not only okay, but necessary to prioritize that right now.

• What is our plan for our mental health and our family’s well being? Many of us are making plans right now about how to work from home while our children play or do schoolwork, or how to find childcare as we continue to work to provide essential services, or what we’ll do to get through this time financially. We can also make plans and communicate them about how to get through this time emotionally. And we can talk about it- it doesn’t have to be a secret! Even saying to children, “Staying inside and not seeing my friends is hard for me. I think I need a plan to get through this,” and then sharing your plan with them can be revelatory! If they are old enough to understand and discuss their fears, we can also tell them something like, “This is a scary time, and I know other people are taking care of us and our community- we need a plan of how we take of ourselves and each other. This is what I’m thinking I’ll do for myself…” This normalizes acknowledging emotional needs and helps them come up with a plan, too.

• When we make plans for self-care, sometimes we underestimate community care. I think one of the most challenging things for this time is that the ways we often care for one another are off limits. Hugging, making food, and sharing space with each other all feel suspect. When physical distance is what will keep us safe, we need to be sure to not allow our emotional distance to grow. As human beings, we not only want to be cared for, but we want to care for others. So in addition to healthy meals, exercise, a solo walk with the dog, prayer/meditation, etc, what do we build that is about caring for others? Is it getting groceries for a neighbor? Checking on a friend who lives solo? Calling grandma to see how she’s doing or just holding the phone while she watches the little one play?

• What is our plan for conflict? Hopefully some of the above helps us communicate with others – but this is a stressful time, and we know conflict is a normal part of life. Talk about how you would like conflict to be handled. This can be talking about what is off the table – whether with a partner or with a child- and also about what ways of addressing conflict works best for you. For many of us, “I feel” statements work better than telling us something we’re doing wrong. For your children, knowing what to expect and not expect from you during this time can be very reassuring. And it can help everyone stay on track to know what our goals and expectations are for communication!

• This is a time in which we are bound to get discouraged again and again about what we are not able to do. It can be upsetting to think that our child is “falling behind in school,” and we’re all grieving that this is not how we want their childhood to be. That is natural, and it is important to feel those feelings. What we can focus on is what we are giving them right now. Tools for getting through hard things. Emotional literacy. Skills for navigating conflicts and relationships. We may not be able to teach our kids the “new math” while juggling working from home or figuring out how to make ends meet without a paycheck, but we can teach our children about how to love and support each other when things are tough.

Reframing Child Abuse Prevention for Parents & Caregivers

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month, and we want to push the dialogue about preventing sexual abuse of children a bit further.

Many of us remember prevention strategies that center around “good touch/bad touch,” or lessons about how no one should ever touch us in the area covered by a swimsuit without our permission.

This line of thinking, though well intentioned, should be filed away in the same place we put “Stranger Danger.”

We know that an overwhelming amount of child abuse happens by people children know, and oftentimes love, and that it isn’t sudden. There is a grooming process where emotional and physical boundaries are crossed, preparing the child for other boundary violations.

So why do we, as a community, persist in primarily focusing our efforts on the least likely scenarios of stranger assault and sudden or overwhelming force?

It’s easier. It’s easier in so many ways. It’s emotionally easier to consider the threat coming from the evil and malicious “other” than it is to consider that someone we care for may hurt our child. It’s also easier logistically! Teaching a child to avoid strangers and to not allow others to touch them in certain areas is certainly easier to teach than the complexities of trust and boundaries.

To be effective in preventing child abuse, we need a unified team of supporters in our children’s lives. We need to share the same messages with our children. Some good ones to start with are:

* Children are allowed to show affection at their own pace. Just because they LOVE their Aunt Julia doesn’t mean they are ready to hug or kiss her, or that they always want to do so. Help others in their lives understand that by letting your child choose how they show affection helps protect them against sexual abuse!

* We don’t keep secrets in our family. Helping children distinguish between a secret and a surprise can help them understand that they should always tell if something happens that worries them, regardless of what others may say.

* “No” means “no.” Demonstrating that you respect their body sovereignty at a young age can be powerful. Examples can range from a child squealing “No!” when being tickled and stopping to check and see if s/he really wants you to stop, to discussing when you need to help them with their hygiene, nutritional health, or crossing the street.

For more ideas on how to keep your children safe without scaring them (or you!), please join us at a free  Protecting Young Children seminar (this Sunday in ABQ!) or arrange to have us speak with your group or school!

Ignoring It Doesn’t Always Make It Better

Many of us received the same advice for harassment and bullying as we did for bees: ignore it, and it’ll go away.

While that strategy has worked for me countless times with bees, the truth is that it is only one of many strategies for dealing with problems and conflict. And oftentimes this coping mechanism really doesn’t work the way we want.

One of the key reasons ignoring it doesn’t always make harassment and conflict go away is that the problems are often systemic.

A child being harassed for wearing glasses or hand-me-down clothes is likely experiencing poor treatment because of how s/he looks or the economic status of his/her family. A teen girl who is harassed on the street is experiencing sexism, and depending on how she is perceived, could also be experiencing other biases. A boy harassed because of the way he walks or his lisp could be experiencing homophobia, transphobia and/or sexism.

Ignoring the problem ultimately doesn’t make the problem go away because the harassers, bullies and assailants are working with the same book. The minute one person stops making comments about your weight or skin color, the next one moves in – or they move on to someone else. Their biases don’t disappear just because a particular incident ends.

At IMPACT, we teach about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, etc. in order to become more effective agents of change and prevent violence from growing in our communities.

We also explore various responses we might have to harassment. Some days I just want it to end, so I simply walk away or ignore it. Other days I feel up to telling the person to stop and that it’s not okay and leaving it at that. Other days I feel ready to take on the entire issue, educating the aggressor by addressing the behavior and the bias behind it.

As bystanders, we have choices of how and when to act as an ally to the targeted person — sometimes that’s intervening during the incident itself; other times it involves approaching the person targeted to express support or approaching the person who is using hurtful behavior to educate and hold that person accountable.

Depending on the context and environment and the day we’re having, sometimes as bystanders and as those targeted ourselves, we feel safe and are ready for different levels of struggle and different levels of self-advocacy and advocacy for others.

The idea is to have a range of tools for dealing with harassment and bullying so that we can be as proactive as possible. With this knowledge, we can work to make our communities feel safer and stronger together.

How Our Misunderstanding of Sexual Assault Leads to a Misunderstanding of Self-Defense

We have seen countless movies and news reports that feature scary men behind bushes with knives; we’ve watched countless cartoons where the “bad guys” can always be spotted by their jagged teeth and bulging eyes. As a result, our society is deeply confused about who perpetrates assaults and how.

Combine this with subtle and persistent messages in advertisements and sitcom plots that undermine the idea of consent, and we have created strong misunderstandings about sexual assault and domestic violence. Even assault victims can have difficulty understanding and naming what happened to them.

“He didn’t hold me down” and “He didn’t use a weapon” describe the confusion felt by victims that oftentimes concludes with: “I’m not sure it was rape.”

“Well, he didn’t mean to say that/do that” is a confusion often expressed by domestic violence victims, who were led to believe that perpetration is typically intentional and that someone is either bad or good, not something more complex.

However, we know that the majority of assaults happen by people we know, and typically by people we initially, maybe even the majority of the time, have good feelings about.

Unfortunately, these misperceptions — caused by a combination of misrepresentation in the media and a fervent desire to be able to trust those in our lives 100% — oftentimes lead to vulnerability.

The trouble is that most seeking to prevent assault in their or their children’s lives look for programs based on the misperceptions described above. And many self-defense programs plan their curricula around these same misconceptions. Others, believing the risks as they’ve been portrayed, may declare that they have no need for personal safety training, because they live in a “safe community.”

Fundamentally, a safety program must address these misconceptions and teach defenses that address the real threats our communities face. This does not exclude physical skills, but it understands that the real importance in a class like this is navigating changing relationships, evaluating others’ actions and setting our own boundaries — and recognizing our right to do so.

Preparing for Safety and Success in School

Families have a long to-do list when preparing for the new school year. We buy growing children new clothes or figure out hand-me-downs, gather pencils and notebooks… And when the first day comes, it can be filled with excitement or dread!

Every child loves learning. You only need to watch an infant learning to crawl or walk to see their pride at mastering a new skill.

So, why is it that getting kids to school can be so difficult at times? For many of us, it was the social arena that proved the most stressful part of school, not the big test coming up.

How many of us would have concentrated better in school or had better attendance if we had the skills to deal with problems that came up with friendships, classmates, and people we interacted with on the way to school?

When youth have a plan for dealing with a stressful social situation, it means they can choose a strategy to deal with the issue as it arises, and then put the thought away. But when a concern arises and they don’t have a strategy, this unsolved issue makes it very difficult to concentrate on what is in front of them.

When youth have the skills to speak up and take action against bias, social cruelty, bullying, harassment and exclusion, as well as answer the “what if it gets worse?” question in their minds, our communities are safer and more supportive for everyone. Individual students can spend more time learning & succeeding and less time worrying about their social interactions.

It can be frightening to address our fears about our children head on, but we do it. We do it so they are prepared for security and success. We do it with fire safety; we do it with car and bicycle safety. We can also do it with personal safety.

Protecting Our Communities After Tragedy

Imagine, for a moment, hearing about a tragic car accident. Imagine overhearing bits and pieces about a driver swerving out of control and hitting oncoming traffic at a speed of over 75 mph. You see clips of family members of those who died sobbing on the news. People talk about it for over a week.

How would you perceive that story? How long would it take for you to recover?

Now, imagine that same story but that you had never heard about seat belts, never learned the rules of the road, how to maintain safe distance, and how to look around your car and rearview mirror for irregularities. In fact, imagine you were told that you would be cared for in that sort of situation by people who said they could handle it, but still look fearful.

How would you perceive that story and how would you feel about getting into a car again? How long would it take you to recover?

Now, imagine you are seven years old.

Having tools makes all the difference. It doesn’t mean car accidents never happen, but it means that you have an understanding of how to deal with the risk and that the story plays in your head differently.

Just as you wouldn’t teach a new driver about car accidents and drunken drivers first thing, school shootings are not the place to start a discussion about child or school safety. Even trained officers and military struggle with how to deal with shooters — this is not the topic to begin with for teachers, families and children!

Just as car safety begins with learning about adjusting mirrors and looking both ways before pulling out of the driveway, personal safety for children has the same basic steps.

Teach them to trust their intuition. Teach them how to get help and what to say. Help them practice setting a boundary and saying no. Help them learn simple physical strategies to stop an assault.

By teaching them to deal with scenarios like bullying and unwanted touch, you prepare them for situations that are statistically far more likely and that they can do something about, and you empower them to deal with the terrifying stories that, unfortunately, they will continue to hear as they grow older.

I highly recommend the following articles from Kidpower for caregivers and others:

Helping Children Regain Their Emotional Safety After a Tragedy

How to Empower Kids in the Face of Armed School Violence

Tragic Shootings: Kidpower Answers to Common Questions About How To Be Safe

Saying Goodbye to “Stranger Danger”

We pride ourselves at IMPACT for basing our programs on solid research and responding to dangers in the community. Occasionally the research or the danger changes, which means our program changes.
A Washington Post article from 2010 summarized data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children showing how rare stranger abductions are in the United States. IMPACT’s children’s class has always emphasized boundary-setting with people you know more than safety with strangers. We do this because data shows the majority of assaults and abuse of children are perpetrated by people they know.
IMPACT is shifting its children’s classes to incorporate this research, and because we have found a few issues with strict rules with strangers. The first issue is that following these rules often becomes more important than listening to one’s intuition, which is an important skill for a child to cultivate. Children are also likely to break the “stranger rules” if they need help, which can be confusing (a policeman is also a stranger). Teaching them to avoid strangers may create xenophobia and decrease an impetus to intervene as bystanders that witness violence. We believe this later works against the safe communities we all try to create. Most skills we teach with strangers in our adult and teen classes are transferable skills (i.e. skills that might be easier to role-play while imagining a stranger, though they can also be useful later with someone we know). IMPACT teaches awareness, yelling and physical techniques that are still appropriate and useful responses in stranger scenarios.
I am proud to announce that our children’s classes will continue focusing on teaching transferable skills, teaching awareness and boundary-setting with people that the children know (both adults and bullies) as well as physical self-defense skills with a non-specific “bad guy.” We will also incorporate role-plays with strangers where the children have to rely on their intuition (with coaching and feedback from staff and other students) to judge how to best interact and when they need to find a trusted adult.
Please join me in congratulating our staff in making this bold move to take a further step away from “stranger danger” in order to better prepare our children for life without scaring them. And if you have little ones, we’d love to see them in our class at the end of the month!

Sharing Our Stories

Storytelling is an important part of how we all learn.  So, we would do well to think about what the moral of the story is before we tell it.  When it comes to personal safety, the moral is all too frequently:

a) be scared!
b) don’t do that!
c) it could happen to you
d) there’s no way of foreseeing it/preventing it
e) you have to watch out for those people (promoting prejudice)
or f) all of the above.

One of our instructors had a couple free minutes with a class of 6th graders where the students wanted to tell stories about frightening situations they had experienced.  Since we know kids easily latch onto sensationalized tales of danger and we prefer our kids classes to be non-scary, she coached them: “And what did you do?  Did that keep you safe?  Sounds like a scary situation that you handled really well – and you stayed safe.  Good for you!”

She told the students that when they tell each other stories, they must include the parts where they were successful.  They must include what someone did to get out of the situation, how they acted to keep it from getting worse, and where they turned to for help.  People listen to your stories, she explained, and you can be their teacher instead of just scaring them.

We as adults would be smart to follow the same advice our instructor gave those students.

When I think of an interesting story I saw on the news or something someone told me, and I want to tell someone else about it, I consider,

a) does it avoid the scare-tactic points above?
b) is it actually for this person’s benefit, and if so – what’s the lesson?
c) does it provide useful information that someone can use practically?

By following these guidelines, we can be sure that when we share safety information with others – children and adults – we are helping to prepare them, not scare them.

Parents Protecting Kids

After the attempted abduction reported in the news last year, our public children’s classes have experienced the highest demand ever.  Several parents confided that though they had delayed sending their children to a class for a variety of reasons, seeing these news stories crystallized the need for them.?

I think that it’s very important for parents to know what we teach in class before registering their child(ren).  So, I talk with families about it being taught in a fun, friendly, and non-scary way; I describe the different aspects: awareness, verbal, and physical skills; strangers, people they know, bullies, a safe person who can help…

I then describe the premise the entire class hinges on.  I tell them that we ask the 6-12 year-olds, “If you are with an adult, whose job it is to keep you safe?”  The children usually answer in chorus, “The adult’s!”  In this way, they can clarify that the skills they are learning are for only when they are alone.

They’re very clear about it, you see.  However, after six hours of training, often a 6 year-old knows more in a factual, experiential, proven way about personal safety than his/her parent.

In order to care for your children, you have to know more than them in key areas.  If I want my child to eat well, I have to know what foods to buy.  Certainly, I hope that she will choose well when alone based on what I’ve taught her and what she’s learned in school, but the overall fitness of her diet depends on me and she knows that.

We must learn to take care of ourselves in order to care for our young people.  Knowing that his/her guardian can protect him/her in case of danger is much of what makes a child feel safe.  It’s even better when you know that it’s true.

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