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The world is a scary place for a child without violent stories filling the news, yet after a week like this one where it’s almost impossible to avoid some exposure to the tragedies in Texas and Boston, not to mention the natural disasters that have rocked countries overseas, there’s an excellent chance they’ll come to you with questions.

So what does a parent or guardian do?

Pam Allyn at Huffington Post has six ways to talk about tragedy to children that will hopefully lead them to face the world, perhaps not fearlessly, but at least with hope.

Anger is OK. Sometimes it is very useful.

For a child, anger is a complicated emotion. Children are sometimes told it’s not an appropriate feeling. But they feel it nevertheless, and wonder what to do about it. We can help children to not only manage those feelings, but convert them. Consider heroes like Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa and Mahatma Gandhi, who have become known over the years for their peaceful, non-violent solutions to world problems. In fact, each of them burned with anger and then turned this anger into real action. Read aloud to your child from great speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and by other heroes who spoke out against injustice. Let them see the real human effort involved in converting anger to action.

The world is safer than it sometimes seems.

When a tragedy happens, a child’s world is shaken. Nothing feels safe. It is important to help children re-frame their world so as to remind him or her of the daily ways we live so securely. We travel, eat, sleep, talk, make friends, go to work and school all many, many times and all around the world every single day and a million times a year. These are all blessings we can count on…

Full story at Huffington Post.

Talking time to talk to kids.

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