When a disruptive event takes place inside or outside of your community, it is hard to know how your life will be impacted in both the short and long term. With looming uncertainty, it is difficult for adults to make choices for their families, decide how to seek or offer help, and make future plans. While dealing with this uncertainty is often challenging for adults, it can be even trickier for kids, who often don’t have the experience, information, and context to guess what might happen next.
Because kids also don’t usually have as much control over their day-to-day lives as adults, a loss of routine and choice can make uncertain times feel even more overwhelming.
“When we don’t know what’s going to happen next, it can be hard for parents and caregivers to know how to support their children,” says Katarina Corda, senior director of program development at Girls on the Run. “Our role as adults is not always to have the answers. It’s to stay attuned to our children’s ongoing needs, keep the lines of communications open, and offer whatever sense of steady care and consistency we can.”
Whether there has been a rapid or drastic change in your girl’s life, or you’re struggling with how to address uncertainty that hasn’t quite touched your family directly, it’s important to remember that your words and actions have the power to help her get to the other side of whatever is going on. You can help her tap into her mental and emotional reserves. “We can’t always change what’s happening in the world around us,” says Katarina, “but we can offer support to our girls in a way that helps them cope with stress and uncertainty in a healthy way.”
Read on to find out how you can support your girl through uncertain times.
Let Her Know You’re Always Available to Talk About the Hard Stuff and Allow Her to Lead the Conversation
As caregivers, it may feel tempting to try to buffer your children from hard or scary things happening around them. Unfortunately, this is often impossible. If your family has been personally impacted by an event or you have loved ones at the center of something scary, your girl probably already has an idea of what’s happening.
When you address the situation head-on in conversation, your words can help your girl feel safer and more in control of her own life, even when things feel out of control externally. If your girl brings up a topic, or you feel like it’s important to launch a discussion, you can start by asking her what she knows about whatever is going on. As she shares, do your best to correct any misconceptions she may have and validate the uncomfortable feelings she may be experiencing.
Even if you don’t have all the answers your girl is looking for, making her aware she can ask you anything will steady her world. By making space for any of your girl’s needs or questions, you affirm that you’re always ready to talk. Remember, actions matter too. When your girl brings up something tough, do your best to give the topic, and her, the direct attention they both deserve.
Keep Taking Your Emotional Temperature
Often, when our girls are struggling with uncertainty and overwhelming big changes or scary events, grown-ups are struggling too. Take the time to reflect on your own feelings, name them, and share those feelings with your girl. When you reflect on and share your own feelings, you’ll be setting an example and preparing yourself to offer her support as she navigates her emotions. Throughout this experience, do not feel pressure to only share the comfortable feelings – let your girl know it’s okay to feel any kind of feeling and that no emotion is bad.
When you’re opening the conversation, you can start by sharing your feelings but don’t move on without asking her how she’s feeling. Let her know that it’s okay to experience a range of emotions at the same time and that it’s normal for our feelings to change over time. Tell her that you’ll be continuing to talk about the big things going on around you and how you’re both feeling about them and then follow up regularly.
During overwhelming times, it’s important to keep taking your emotional temperature — check in with your girl daily, identify your emotions, and share out. It can be helpful to create an intentional check-in ritual that makes sharing and processing your big feelings together easier. Even something as straightforward as doing a scan of your body together before going to bed can make it simpler for your girl to recognize her feelings and create the space for you to help her name them.
Help Your Girl Create Certainty in Times of Uncertainty
Consistency and structure are crucial to giving kids a sense of control and agency in times that feel scary or out of their control, so don’t miss opportunities to help your girl build some things she can count on in her daily life.
Work with your girl to establish or maintain a routine similar to the routine she followed before the stage of uncertainty and be sure she’s involved in identifying and prioritizing the things that are most important to her. One way to build certainty into your girl’s daily life is working together to write a daily schedule (even if it changes each day) displayed somewhere easy to spot. You can also implement (or continue) a morning routine you can do together such as journaling, taking a walk, or going for a bike ride. While these steps may seem small, knowing how the day will start and what will come next can provide the comfort your girl needs to feel safe.
If much of your daily schedule is out of your girl’s control, you can support her need for certainty by working to identify things she has a choice in and then giving her this choice whenever possible. Even something as simple as choosing between toast and cereal for breakfast, rather than whatever the adult in her life prepares for her, can provide her with a sense of control that can feel stabilizing.
You can also help your girl feel more stable by pointing out or asking her to notice what remains consistent even amid the uncertainty. For example, if she’s feeling anxious about being somewhere away from home, you can point out that no matter what bed she’s sleeping in, you’ll be there to tuck her and tell her a favorite story.
Identify Ways to be a Community Helper, or Point Out Ways You Have Been Helped
Being part of a community means that sometimes you’re the one offering help, and sometimes you’re the one receiving help from others. If you’re able to help others in your community, brainstorm with your girl about what you can do as a team and then take action. When your girl sees that she can help, she will feel more in control of what’s going on around her.
If you’re in a position where you’re receiving help, find ways to help your girl notice the support your family is receiving and talk about all the many people who made that support possible. For example, it may be obvious that the people on the ground delivering supplies are community helpers but ask your girl what other steps had to take place for those community helpers to offer their assistance. As your girl thinks about all the people who have her back, both inside and outside her community, she’s likely to feel a greater sense of connection to those around her and at least a little bit steadier.
Dealing with the uncertainty spurned by local or national events that we don’t have control over is hard for most adults. For kids, this uncertainty can cause even deeper feelings of fear and stress. As the grown-up in your girl’s life, your words and actions play a major role in how your girl processes all that is going on around her.
Process and share your own emotions, let your girl take the lead in conversations about hard topics, provide certainty and choice, and help your girl see how much community matters. As you help your girl move through the hard stuff, hold her close, and let her know that you’ll always be there for her. And, if you’re feeling scared, stressed, and overwhelmed, know that there are people out there rooting for you, too.
Visit our Parent Resource page for more tools and tips to share with your girl.