6 Ways to Help Your School-Age Children With Hurtful Situations

In the first five years of our children's lives, we are able to protect them from most of life's hurts. If they fall and scrape a knee, we clean, bandage, and kiss it. When they wake up frightened or sick in the middle of the night, we hold them tightly and wipe away their tears.
However, when they turn five and begin school, their worlds expand greatly. They begin interacting with many children who come from backgrounds both like and unlike their own.


It is no surprise then, when our children come home saying that another child is saying mean things about them. This happened to my child recently. After getting over my initial urge to call up the mother and tell her what I thought about her child, I realized something important. Gone are the days when we can completely protect our children from the outside world. Therefore as parents, it is our role and duty to know what is going on in the daily lives of our children. More importantly, we need to keep the lines of communication open while ensuring that home is a safe haven.


Here are some of my ideas of how we can do this for our children:

1. When greeting our children after the school day ends, show excitement and happiness. Think of how you feel when someone barely acknowledges your presence, or does so with little enthusiasm.
2. When our children come home from school, make a point of sitting down with them to discuss what went on during the day. This is a good way to find out what the highlights of the day were, and if there were any issues.

3. Provide a home environment that our children look forward to returning to after the school day ends. For example, avoid the urge to criticize our children as soon as they walk through the door and throw their coats on the floor. Although it is important to teach our children that this is not appropriate behavior, come up with other less confrontational options.
4. Teach our children coping strategies. Ask them what they can do when another child says or does something that violates their sense of what is acceptable. Teach them that it is okay to ask an adult for help. Role play what they can say or do in similar situations that come up in the future.

5. Establish a meaningful bedtime routine that includes quality time with our children. We had fallen into the bad habit of letting our children watch a cartoon show before bedtime. However, we found it was cutting into time that could be better spent cuddling and reading books.
6. At the end of the day, spend time talking with each child individually in bed for five to ten minutes. Often, this is when we learn the most about what is going on in our children's lives.


Author: Kimberly Gingras

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