How Can Connecting with My Kids Help Keep Them Safe?
How you connect with your kids helps them or hurts them, especially in a crisis. Communication is critical to your relationship, and how you communicate is within your control. If you set a good example and encourage positive connections for your kids, it can help them greatly.
How can connection help your family during a crisis?
Stop causing harm by how you communicate
Without knowing it, parents can make a situation worse by how they talk to their kids. Stop any harmful communication styles you use such as anger, control, being condescending, using hurtful words, and focusing on the negative. The “What Do You Do?” article below will help.
Stop enabling and weakly giving in to your kids
Don’t encourage harmful behavior in your kids by shielding them from negative consequences of their bad choices. That’s enabling, and it makes things worse to allow dangerous behavior to escalate. It cripples your kids from maturing and learning to deal with life themselves.
Help your kids connect to positive, helpful people
When your kids struggle, help them connect with as many positive people as possible. This can be encouraging relatives, friends who set a good example, mentors, counselors they feel comfortable with, understanding youth pastors, or a peer group of kids with similar issues.
Here are some other resources to help you stay connected in a crisis:
- What Do You Do When You Can’t Talk to Your Teenagers?
- How Parents Can Connect with Their Kids
- How Parents Can Connect with Their Teenagers
- What Every Teenager Needs to Hear
Next Right Steps: Write down reasons why it is important for you to compassionately connect to your teenagers when they are struggling.
