4 Effective Parenting Tips During a Crisis

Parenting is difficult in the best of situations—during a crisis, it’s near-impossible to be consistent and intentional. To help, here are some parenting tips.

When you’re in crisis mode, your ability to parent suffers. Whether the crisis is the COVID-19 pandemic, your divorce, a loved one’s death, or something else, you may find yourself reacting to your kids’ behaviors rather than guiding them. This kind of parenting fails to show kids what is right and only chides them for doing wrong. Amid the chaos, you can take small steps towards intentional parenting that will help you and your children in the long run. To help you do this, here are some effective parenting tips during a crisis.

Establish Routines, Keep the Noise Out

First, to insulate your kids from the full-on effects of the crisis, establish routines that keep their days regular and don’t leave space for fear. When cramped together inside due to COVID-19, create helpful rituals for different times of the day. Schedule times to be together and times for everyone to be more alone. Allow some daily practices to come from your kids so they have some control.

In the case of a loss, retain as much normalcy as possible. Show them that even though a loved one — maybe even your spouse and their parent — is gone, that doesn’t mean their life must totally upend. After allowing space for grief, it’s helpful to keep the structure in kids’ lives to help them recover.

Be Gracious to Your Kids and Yourself

Give your kids and yourself abundant grace as you navigate a tough situation. As stress or trauma exhausts everyone, it’s likely you and they will fail to be kind, empathetic, and others-focused at some point. Be quick to apologize, slow to anger, and recommit yourself to doing better in the future. As you do this, you model good values to your kids in the time it’s hardest to stick to them, teaching them an invaluable lesson.

Give Space for Questions, Acknowledge How Hard They Are to Answer

Kids are likely to have questions about whatever crisis they’re facing, and they’ll look to you, the adult they most trust, for answers. Ready yourself for these questions, treat them seriously and strive to ease their worries where appropriate. If they’re old enough, consider being more frank with them about the effects of the crisis. Just as important as giving answers is your readiness to admit you don’t have all the answers, though. Be ready to admit the great difficulty of a situation and help them navigate their feelings of helplessness.

Point Them Towards Service

Our final parenting tip during a crisis is to point your kids towards serving others, especially if the crisis they’re experiencing is one they share with others. During the COVID-19 pandemic, to teach your kids to give back to their community as people suffer illness, consider ways they can share gestures of kindness with others. This helps them manage their feelings and turn their stress into something positive rather than destructive.

Additionally, while there are many reasons to give someone a gift, giving to someone during a crisis can encourage them when they need it and even provide them things they truly need to get by. Teaching an impulse towards service will help your kids grow into giving people that sees crisis, not as an obstacle but an opportunity for unexpected good.

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