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Changing Times
The world is more complicated, these days, than it used to be.
Having the “world at our fingertips” carries a lot of responsibility, because there are a lot of things going on today that most of us would prefer not to have on our hands.
Especially the things we can’t do anything about, but have a way of sneaking into our own personal lives, until we are forced to deal with them.
Like having a child ask – when you’re right in the middle of dinner preparations and still trying to get problems at work off your mind – if a person could survive a nuclear blast
by hunkering down in the bathtub, they way they do with tornadoes.
Or if washing your hands gets rid of West Nile Virus germs (should you happened to have touched a mosquito) the same way it does for the bathroom kind.
Or if maybe you should be considering a move to a new neighborhood, on account of someone said the old uncle living with the Moslem family in apartment 104B was really Osama Bin Laden, in hiding.
And what exactly is a jihad, anyway?
Even if you are a discriminating parent who not only monitors the TV but knows exactly where your child is throughout the day, there are some influences that happen so fast, there isn’t
enough time to yell, “Incoming!”… much less, ward them off.
And one can get more frustrated at having to answer these kind of questions than what ghost wings look like, if there is such a thing.
What’s more there is a new debate that parents cringe to encounter, lately, and that is whether everything you hear on the six o’clock news is really true.
Which isn’t such a tough question until you try to convince your darling that what they thought they heard was really not what was said.
Are the monsters in your life taking a back seat to having to check under beds and in closets at bedtime for terrorists or intruders?
Children are starting to suspect that a favorite bed toy – including the meanest and greenest of all dinosaurs – is not going to cut it when it comes to the sort of protection one needs against these new threats.
Even the adults are scared of these. That’s how they talk, anyway, and they never talked like that about monsters and ghost wings.
One can not – in good conscience – get after a child who digs a six foot hole in the backyard in an endeavor to construct a bomb shelter, when it’s a known fact that the neighbors
two doors down, have a year’s supply of food and ammunition secreted away for the very same reasons.
After all, children are only human.
Yes, there are things going on in the world over which the individual (no matter how capable and organized) has absolutely no control.
Bad things.
The kind we would all avoid, if given the choice.
The truth is, there always have been.
Every generation has suffered its share of war and hard times, and our times – because of our advances in technology – seem more perilous simply because most individuals get a
running report of every bad thing that’s happening the world over, every evening, around the same time as their supper.
Which is a pretty tall order for us level-headed adults to swallow.
 No wonder our children are getting concerned.
More than a few of us wake up with the startling discovery of some version of the “meanest and greenest of all dinosaurs” next to our pillows: put there on temporary loan from some sympathetic offspring.
So, what’s a parent to do?
In allowing ourselves to become too distracted by the things that we can’t change, we often miss the opportunities to change the things we can.
There are many things parents can do to promote a sense of comfort and well-being in their children.
And although they may not have an earth-shaking effect on the state of the world, they can have profound effects on your very own home, every day.
A little light always perfects vision, and even though it might only be in a small corner of a dark place, that little light might be all a person needs to see where to place the next step.
People all down through history have found their way through amazing earth-shaking events that way.
Here are some ways to do that:
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ZERO IN ON THE GOOD THINGS.
No matter what is going on in the world, the average individual is not omniscient.
Most of us can do little more than one thing at a time, and considering there are still only twenty-four hours in a day (even after all these years), that pretty much limits how much we can take in at once.
So be picky.
Thinking, talking, and participating in good things makes people (especially children) feel good.
So, when you have a choice, choose the good things.
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AVOID EXPRESSIONS OF FEAR AND UNCERTAINTY AROUND CHILDREN.
And don’t think because they are busy with something, they aren’t listening.
Especially when visiting with other adults.
Children’s ears perk up at the mention of words they are highly concerned about (just like adults), and they have better ears than we do.
What’s more, they take everything literally.
Especially such as phrases like, “I just don’t know what we’d ever do if…”
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BE REASSURING.
Take a lesson from the good doctors and nurses who deal day in and day out with human pain and suffering.
They have discovered that merely saying, “You’re going to be fine,” whether they know this to be fact, or not, has an amazing effect on a person’s psyche.
And history proves that many times, the human psyche will override the facts.
People have been known to survive against amazing odds, simply because they believed that they could.
And they do.
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TALK ABOUT THINGS. If you have to have the evening news every night with dinner, at least make a point of discussing it with your children.
Find out how they feel, and what their opinions are about things.
Things that never occurred to you, might affect them in ways a mere explanation from you could dissolve.
Which could help them sleep better at night… which, in turn, might allow you to do the same.
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BE AGE APPROPRIATE.
Talking about war with a teenage child is different than talking about it with a preschooler.
A teenager is of an age to need to decide where to stand, while a younger child may be slipping under the bed when the lights are out, and having nightmares about being attacked before morning.
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TAKE GOOD ADVICE.
If you hear a “parental discretion is advised” warning before certain films or photos are going to be aired on TV, take the network at their word.
No amount of explaining can soften the impact of seeing dead women and children piled up in the streets, or angry mobs, in the mind of a child.
Images seem to last much longer than words, and take ten times the effort to dispel after they have once gained a foothold into a young mind.
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SMILE.
A smile is worth a thousand words when it comes to explaining, or reassuring, or trying to convince a child that everything is going to be all right, today.
Children have the amazing capacity to lock into a smile in the midst of pain and confusion, or any other outside force, when it comes to focusing in on what really matters in life.
If you haven’t smiled at your children at least three times in a single day… then make it a habit, so that you never forget to, again.
 Times change, but people don’t.
If you can make it important to emphasize the human limits of every day, your children will follow your lead and do the same.
We might not be able to change the course of world events, or even many of the effects those events can have on our individual lives.
But we can change the tone of the time we personally have allotted to us, each and every day.
And in doing that, we will not only have more peaceful homes to live in, we will be making the most of our choices of how we will spend our time.
Don’t like the way time has been treating you, lately?
Then pick something better to do.
That’s the secret of changing times.
Parents who would like to discuss our "changing times," please join us in the chat room on Wednesday at 9pm (eastern) for our weekly forum.
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