Getting yourself and even your spouse/significant other into prepping is overall fairly easy. You cans it down, weigh out the facts, and make some decisions on what you need to do to protect yourself and others from disaster.
Kids on the other hand, do handle facts and reasoning as well as an adult does, which means you can’t just give them facts and expect them to make the right decision. Worst of all, it’s much easier to scare a child with facts about disaster and the end of the world, something you really don’t want to do.
Facts are great and you shouldn’t hide anything from your kids, but to get them to help with your prep and understand what it is you’re doing, there are some basic tips you should follow. Here are three tips to help get your kids into prepping.
1. Make it Fun
This is how you get kids to do just about anything. If it isn’t fun, kids don’t want to do it.
Take small survival skills and make each one into a self-contained game. For example, geocaching is a popular game played by kids and adults alike, and while it’s fun to hunt down a geocache and see what’s inside it, this teaches the very real skills of map, GPS, and compass use. Make some geocaches for your kids and go hunt down ones in the real world. Your kids won’t even realize they’re learning skills.
Other games can be based around survival skills like building a fire from only items found in the woods, no firestarters allowed, building a shelter that you and the child get to sleep in over night, and who can fit the most into their packs.
All these make games out of skills that they will need in an emergency.
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2. Focus on Survival, Not Disasters
Like we said above, kids generally don’t have the mental capacity to deal with the thought of the world ending. If you try to make them understand it you can affect far more than their want to prep.
Break them into the idea slowly and while you shouldn’t lie to them, there’s no reason to hit them with harsh truth. The fact of the matter is, the only motivation they need to learn these skills is you. While you and I started prepping because of realizations like terrorism and the state of oil, kids only need their parents to convince them something is a good idea.
Focus on survival aspects and vague emergencies instead of factual real-world ones. It’s fine to tell your child that you’re learning to build a shelter in case you’re camping and you rip a big hole in the tent by mistake, but not so great to tell them that a nuclear weapon might be used and you may have to run out of the house and into the wild with nothing but a backpack each.
Survival skills are fun and cool to kids, so focus on them and you’ll be far more successful.
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3. Make Prepping a Normal Part of Life
The last tip is probably the most important. You can’t make prepping and survival a weekend-only event. To truly get your kids into the prepping world it needs to be a common part of everyday life.
Build GOOD drills into the week the same way other families do fire drills, explain why you have gallons of water n the basement, and let your kids help organize your food stores.
Making prepping a part of every day life will not only help make it a norm for them, but it won’t seem as weird to them, which means they’re less likely to tell secrets about it to their friends. Teaching them that it’s just the way things should be done, and that it’s only to be talked about within the family will help make them feel special about what it is you’re doing, and will help keep your prep quiet.
