Lose Your Job? Children Should Probably Get the Straight Story

Fired, laid off, downsized--you’ve become a fugitive from the law of supply and demand. It’s probably not the first thing you think of and maybe not even the second, but eventually you’ve got to face it: What do you tell the kids?

If you’ve suddenly become jobless, should you break the news to your children or leave them pleasantly in the dark? And if you decide to tell them, how should you do it?

In the olden days, the answer seemed pretty clear-cut. Children had no business poking around in the affairs of adults. No, honey, this isn’t a bomb shelter, it’s our new underground playroom.

But child development experts today tend to agree that telling the bad news to children, particularly school-age kids, is probably best. They’re going to figure out that something is up anyway, so you’d better give them the straight story before their little imaginations cook up something even worse.

“Kids are so egocentric that if you’re acting grumpy, they’ll assume you’re mad at them,” said Jill Waterman, a child psychologist who teaches at UCLA. “Kids know a lot more about our secrets than we think they do anyway.”

A sampling of kids found that they definitely think they should be clued in.

During a recent children’s music and call-in program on the kids radio network Radio AAHS, which is broadcast on 30 stations nationwide by the Minneapolis-based Childrens Broadcasting Corp., listeners were asked to voice their opinions about whether their parents should tell them about a serious problem even if it didn’t affect them directly.

There were about 20 callers ranging in age from 8 to 18, and all said yes, said Amy Finch, host of the “Avenue A” show on Radio AAHS. The show airs on 830 AM in Los Angeles and Orange counties and on 850 AM in the Ventura-Thousand Oaks area.

“I got a lot of response on that one,” said Finch, known simply as Amy on the air. “Several said, ‘Maybe I could help.’ It seemed like a really mature answer to me.”

The question of maturity has a lot to do with whether and how to break bad news to a child. A very young child might merely be frightened and confused by it all. But school-age children, and even some mature preschoolers, need to know what’s going on.

“Let them share this,” said William Sears, a San Clemente pediatrician who is the father of eight children and 23 books, including such well-known titles as “The Fussy Baby: How to Bring Out the Best in Your High Need Child” and “Nighttime Parenting: How to Get Your Baby and Child to Sleep.”

“They need to know that money doesn’t grow on trees or come from the ATM machine if someone doesn’t put it there first,” Sears said. “But you want to be positive. You want to be uplifting.”

Waterman advises waiting until the shock of the layoff has passed and you are calm. Work through your own emotions first.

“It’s important not to lean on the children for support,” said Waterman, the mother of 11-year-old twin boys.

“Don’t let them share your misery,” Sears said. He suggests that parents state the facts simply, then wait for questions. It’s probably best not to get into the reasons the job loss happened.

“Kids being kids, they’ll want to know what’s going to happen to them. That’s what you need to tell them next,” Sears said. Discuss what tight finances will mean to them: The family will eat, but maybe not as much at fast-food restaurants. The big vacation might be canceled, but not the trip to the zoo.

“Let them know that this is just a stage that we’re going to get through,” Sears said.

There are even children’s books on the subject. “Tight Times” by Barbara Shook Hazen (Puffin Books) and “Finding a Job for Daddy” by Evelyn Hughes Masaic (Albert Whitman & Co.) are two in which an out-of-work father figures prominently but is just part of the story.

“We have always felt that bringing up a child, you want to prepare them for real life,” Sears said. “The worst thing you can do is not tell them. They’re going to sense something is wrong, and they might think Mom and Dad are going to get a divorce or it’s something they did.”

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