INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - It's good to plan an important conversation that we should be having with our children right now.
Kids are dealing with so much change, so much loss. We asked Anna Erickson Parker, a psychiatric nurse who works with pediatric patients, how can we help them navigate.
"Our kids really deserve patience from us because they are experiencing grief in this time of both grief and uncertainty. It's really very helpful to just bear witness to their frustration and to understand that, with those stages of grief, that with each fresh loss, they're going to kind of flow back and forth through those stages of grief," Parker said.
"The five stages of grief begin with denial, then anger, then bargaining, which is something that you may see with your kids where because they have lost something that they had taken for granted or were really counting on, they may ask for something else from you as an additional privilege or an additional level of trust as a way of compensating for that. You have denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but with each new loss, they make flux in and out and experience those losses all over again, so those frustrations may be triggered fresh. Every time something changes and there's an additional sense of insecurity with our times as they are," said Parker.
"One of the things that we, as parents, need to share with (children) is that 'we are your source of certainty, we are here experiencing some of these same phenomenon with you' and I promise you that it's not you your kids resent so much as the changing facts of life today. It's really helpful to remember not to minimize their grief, or to make comparisons between the changes that are happening in their lives with what may be happening in yours, because parents experience, for example, job displacement or working from home. There are those tensions that build where we sometimes ask our kids to grow up a little too fast or to minimize their emotions because what we're experiencing is difficult and we want our kids to make it easier for us. We need to be their sense of certainty in these times and actually remind them that we are going through this together, that we can grow through what we go through and that this is an opportunity to practice the guitar, or take the dog for a walk, or learn to sew. There are a lot of hospitals that need to need handmade masks. And this is an opportunity to build a skill, and it can be a skill that can add to that resume that might help those seniors transition to college, or transition to a first job. Something like learning how to make a podcast can really offer them an opportunity to to grow through what they're going through," Parker said