Thinking about kids attempting suicide makes my heart hurt.  To think that a young person, still growing and learning about themselves, would have urges to hurt or even kill themselves.  It seems almost unbelievable, but it happens.

Living with a kid who has suicidal urges can be draining and worrisome.  How do you prepare meals if you fear your child will take a kitchen knife to themselves?  How do you have medication in your home when you fear your child swallowing pills?

How do you know if they held back on their suicidal urges one time that they will hold back the next time?  Do you need to follow them everywhere?  Can you trust them being alone after school?  Could you even cope if you found them lying on the floor either badly hurt or dead?

This is such a highly emotional topic for anyone who’s experienced dealing with a child’s suicide attempts or a completed suicide.  It goes against the order of things – parents are supposed to die before their children.  It’s also confusing, dramatic, filled with so many unanswered questions, and a sense that at any time your
parental heart could crack right in half from the loss (or near loss).

If you can tell your child is suicidal or seems to be acting strangely (saying “goodbye” to everyone important, excessive drinking or drugging, depressed, isolated), be upfront about it.  Don’t gloss it over.  A conversation might reveal things you need to talk about anyway, even if they have no real intent to hurt themselves.  Or, you could truly be saving their life.

Do a 24-hour watch with friends or relatives.  Someone stays awake and physically next to them at all times to ensure their safety.  You can always contact your local hospital’s emergency room or a nearby psychiatric hospital to ask questions or have your child assessed suicidal risk.  800-SUICIDE directs your phone call to the nearest crisis center.

Many kids who make suicide attempts simply want to avoid deep emotional pain.  Everything suicidal is really a wish to escape, not necessarily end it all for good.  Now …

It’s interesting when you stop and actually think about what you do for a minute.  Thinking about thinking – this is one of those things that sets humans apart from all other species.  But do you think we use this skill as well as we can with our daily parenting duties?  Nope, probably not.  I’ll let you in on the latest observations inside myself.

This afternoon one of my daughters was watching TV.  One of my thoughts was, “Well, she’s peaceful and she’s in the middle of her show.  Maybe the laundry can wait.  Might be whiny if I try to shut off her show now.”  Then another thought came through – “She’s watched two separate times already and that’s plenty.  Doesn’t really matter if I interrupt her anyway.  She needs to get on that laundry now”.

So where do you think the first thought came from, my personal feelings or my personal principles?  Yep, that was all feeling.  I was thinking about avoiding emotional upset even though I had something for her to do.  The next thought was from the completely opposite direction.  Quick compliance with respect because I am the parent.

Before I go on, I just want to linger here a little longer.  I didn’t know this was going to be my post topic for today, so this little internal dialogue was just as unknown to me as it is to you.  How often do you go with the first type of thought when you parent?  Do you parent more out of feeling a lot of times?  Or do you parent more out of principal with less consideration for their emotional reactions?

These are good questions to ask, which is why I’m writing this now.  I had to ask myself, “What was I doing?  What direction was I going to take this?”  I think some compassion and consideration is important, but more than anything I try to parent from my principles.

Many times I have said or done something that I knew my girls weren’t going to like but it was the right call.  And …

The downside of having close family relationships is that you will inevitably get hurt.  Even if no one tries to do it, it will certainly happen.  When you open your heart to relationships, the joy can be immeasurable.  But we naturally run the risk of being disappointed, experiencing loss, being shocked, and being scared out of our minds.  It’s not about how to avoid being hurt, it’s about how to cope with it.

There’s also more than one type of family pain.  Grief over the death of a loved one is usually about sadness and wishing the person were alive.  Pain from abuse, divorce, toxic relationships – that’s a different type of pain associated with low self worth and shame.  Things get even more complicated when the two are mixed.

This may or may not be a comforting thought to you, but it’s helped me when I have dealt with grief.  The more pain you feel, the more meaningful that person is (or was) to you.  So going through some really difficult days after something upsetting means you have a strong connection.

And yes, this can be true even when there was family chaos, addiction, or even abuse.  This can be so confusing – you may be glad that person’s influence is gone, but you may also be grieving for the few good memories there were and the things that can never be (admitting they were wrong, reconnection, being good to you, etc).

Of course, there are plenty of unhealthy ways to cope with pain in your family.  Heavy drinking and drug use, ignoring it, isolating yourself, taking it out on others, and the list goes on.  All of these are attempts to get away from the pain – a very understandable and logical reaction to having a lot of hurt in your heart.  But most of those choices simply add pain rather than truly giving you peace.

Choosing positive people to hang out with is a great antidote for family pain.  You create healthy social groups to help you cope with an unhealthy social group.  Or, if your family …

Parents Watch Your Consequences

You may not think there is such a thing as overdoing consequences.  What?  If they do something really bad, shouldn’t there be a really tough consequence?  Yes, but there’s more to giving discipline than just carrying a big stick.

It’s tempting to think that an excessive consequence will really make a child think twice next time about making the same mistake. Being grounded from everything for a year, no car until they’re twenty, no cell phone until they graduate from high school. These kinds of consequences will certainly show your strength is apparent but they might teach your child something other than what you want them to learn.

If they know there is hope that they can go back to a normal life after sticking through a tough consequence, they have something to really work for. Being grounded forever gives them no hope.  When someone has no hope, they have nothing to lose.  This brings on more resistance and more reason to get into trouble – at least it will feel like they have a life.

Do you know what you really happens when you ground a child for a year or more? You also ground yourself for a year or more. That’s right, the real strength in any consequence comes from how consistently the parent works with it and holds to it.  If you commit the child to the punishment, you commit yourself just as tightly.

You could ground your child until they turn eighteen, but if it gets too hard for you to manage and you relax the rules after two months, the threat of excessive punishment means nothing.  What kids learn is that you don’t really mean what you say. You may have a really strong bark, but you won’t bite very hard. You would do better to have a shorter consequence that you can hold 100% of the time.

Here is the important part – children being given a consequence need to know how they can move forward. Just being grounded forever isn’t enough on your part. You want them …