How to talk to your kids about scary problems
By Ramon Flores, Class of 2018

Conference information:

• Conference Program
• Texas Lyceum Fellow Paper

Reflections:
These essays are the views of the authors alone and do not represent the positions of the Texas Lyceum.

How to talk to your kids about scary problems
By Ramon Flores, Class of 2018

I thought the conference was one of the most powerful and humbling of my years in Lyceum, powerful for the content and humbling for the courage shown by our Lyceum colleagues.

Here are some notes I took, paraphrasing two of the doctors on panels:

• Always tell your kids that you’re happy their problems are “my” problems too, and we will face them together.
• If something bad is happening, be confident as a parent. Tell your child, “It’s OK to share the scary thing with me,” and don’t panic. It’s good if our kids talk to us. Often a kid’s fear isn’t based in reality.
• Suicide is not a desire to die, it’s an ambivalence to living.
• Severe mental health is a biological illness.