With the Ukraine invasion still raging, Covid cases rising again and the ongoing climate crisis, young people are picking up anxieties from social media and the playground. So what’s the best way to handle it?
When John Adams and his two daughters settled down to watch a family film, he wasn’t expecting questions about bombing raids. But as they discussed what to watch, he spotted 12-year-old Helen scrolling through YouTube, looking for clips of air-raid sirens. She wanted to know what it would sound like, if the worst came to the worst.
“The question this morning at breakfast was: ‘What are we meant to do if there’s a nuclear attack?’” says Adams, a stay-at-home dad from Caterham in Surrey, who runs the parenting blog DadBlogUK. “That one just took me right back to my childhood, when these were real practical questions and everyone knew that you were meant to get under a table or a flight of stairs.”
