7 Tips for When Your Child Stays Home Alone

Ways to Keep Your Child Safe When Home Alone

As parents, we never want to leave our children home alone, but sometimes it is unavoidable.  Here are a few basics to keep in mind when your child must be home alone.

1.  Discuss any fears your child might have. Start by talking to your child honestly about how they feel about being home alone. Your child’s fears may be calmed with information about simple safety procedures in the house, such as locked windows and doors. Sometimes it’s the unknown that frightens a child. If your child knows he or she won’t have to answer the door or the telephone, that may be enough to put their mind at ease. That’s why it’s so important to get to the bottom of your child’s fear by discussing what’s behind it.

How to Get Your Tween or Teen to Talk to You

How to Communicate with your Tween or Teen

Getting Tweens and Teens to Talk

If you are the parent of a young child, you may still have one who freely talks about her thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences. You may also have heard that once your child becomes older, she will not share with you the way she does now. If you are the parent of a teen or tween, you may now be experiencing a relationship that seems to have little communication within it. You may feel grief over what once was, and wonder where it all went ‘wrong’.