How to talk to your kids about prepping

Have you talked to your kids about prepping yet? It’s challenging. You don’t want them to live in fear, but you want them to be prepared for emergency scenarios, and if you’re teaching them to prep, you need to at least give them a hint of some of the things they might be prepping for.

How to help your kids prep without scaring them to death

There are a number of factors to take into account when you decide how much you want to talk about prepping with your kids, and what you want to tell them. Among these factors are:

• • Their age

• • Their maturity level

• • Their skills and abilities
  • What you and your spouse have agreed to tell them when you talk to your kids about prepping. If your spouse is not on board with prepping, you can at least agree to

• • What you believe they need to be prepared for – natural disaster? Civil war? Grid collapse? Permanent SHTF situation?

• • Your support system – can you work with other family members, neighbors, and friends so that you all have a plan of action in case things go seriously south?

My personal belief is that sooner or later things will fall apart in our country, whether it be due to civil war or attack from outside sources. I just don’t think there’s any way to know when it’s going to happen. There’s also the possibility of large scale natural disasters affecting some or all of the country, or the planet. Since I don’t know exactly what’s coming, the way I approach the issue with my kids is to talk about natural disasters and what we’d do if a tornado or big hurricane or blizzard or some other natural disaster knocked power out and blocked roads for a long time. They’ve been through storms where we lost power and internet – the horror! the horror! – so they already know what could happen. We also practice no tech days where we go the entire day without using any technology, and we talk about it in historical context, as part of homeschooling – what was it like to live before electricity? I say we TRY to go the entire day because I do have to use the phone to check in on family, but other than that, there’s no TV, cell phones, videogames etc. on no tech day. Sometimes we extend this to not using the stove – which relies on electricity – and we eat food that we’ve canned and preserved, and we heat up food on the grill or using little mini camping stoves. Most of us have told our children what to do if a stranger approaches them. We need to prepare them for much more than that, though. What if your child got stranded in the woods? What if, heaven forbid, SHTF and your child was separated from you? What if they’re at school when disaster strikes, and they’re taken to a different site? You want your child to survive and thrive, whether you are their to take care of them or not. So no matter what you tell your children about what they might be preparing for, you want to teach them the basic skills and knowledge they will need to survive, which include:

• • Canning and preserving

• • How to find water and how to disinfect it

• • Basic first aid

• • Outdoor survival skills

• • Navigation without GPS
  • What to do in various emergency situations if they are not with you

Getting Started Prepping with Kids

I am homeschooling for numerous reasons, including religious reasons, social reasons, learning differences, and a general lack of trust in today’s public school system. What I do to help my kids prep is incorporate it into my homeschool curriculum. You can actually make it a lot of fun. For instance, my kids love to help me make jam and jelly and to can and preserve. Free child labor! I don’t even have to pay them minimum wage – I pay them in strawberry jam and the right to lick the spoon! We go over things like food safety, and I have them write the dates that we canned the food on the lids.

Other than cooking, what else can you incorporate into your prepping curriculum – even if it’s just something you do on weekends? Lots of things! You can…

Teach Your Kids Outdoor Survival

We all pray that we’ll never have to bug out, but if we end up having to literally head for the hills, we want our kids to be comfortable and familiar with the great outdoors. Most kids love outdoors activities, especially if they’re doing them with you.  If you’re not experienced in outdoors activities, now’s the time to brush up on your skills, and include your children while you’re learning. To get started, you can:

• • Look for local bushcraft classes near you

• • Check with local arboretums for guided nature walks

• • Check for guided nature walks from your local Audubon Society

• • Take your kids camping

• • Read this article on the marvelously named “Don’t Die In The Woods” website

Teach Your Kids About The Weather

Teach your children to look for and understand weather patterns. How can you tell if a storm is coming? How do animals behave when a storm is coming? Teach them about tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards and other weather events, and what to do in the case of each of these. What should people do when driving in the snow? What should people do if their car gets stuck in the snow? Should they get out and try to walk to get help? (No.) Where should they take shelter if there’s a tornado warning?

Teach Your Kids Basic First Aid

And learn it yourself, of course. Your children should know to apply pressure to a wound if it’s bleeding badly, to wash out a wound, running cool water over a burn, when to apply ice to an injury, how to apply a basic bandage, to stabilize a broken limb, to elevate a bleeding limb while apply pressure, etc. Older children can be taught CPR.

Teach Your Kids About Nutrition

In a longterm SHTF scenario, if you run through your supplies and empty your pantry, survival will depend on being able to hunt, possibly fish if that’s an option, safely prepare and store the game, and to garden and forage. Your children will need to know how to prepare meals that are as balanced as possible, with appropriate amounts of protein, healthy carbs, fruits and vegetables. They will need to understand concepts like getting enough fiber, and what vitamins and minerals are, and what locally available foods will provide the nutrients they need.

Teach Your Kids Navigation

Of course they’d need this if they were lost in the woods, or hiding out in the woods. But being prepared  also calls for being able to navigate on the roads if satellite signal is lost and cell phones aren’t working. They should know how to get home from school, or how to get to a trusted family member’s or friend’s house if they can’t get home from school. It’s not a bad idea for them to carry a small compass with them, and they certainly should learn how to read a compass and a map, and learn how to recognize local landmarks around your home and around your town. This is a LOT, I know. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You didn’t learn to prep in a day, and neither did I. A lot of these skills, like cooking and canning, can be incorporated into everyday life. Make a list of the basic skills you want to teach your kids; you can use this page as a starting point if you find it useful. Then start scheduling in things that are not already incorporated into your current routine, like, say, an emergency first aid class, and then check them off one by one as you get your kids to a level where you feel they have basic proficiency. Don’t forget to revisit your training on a regular basis – use it or lose it, as they say! Remember to make it fun rather than scary, and, keep on prepping!