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My Husband Lost His Job, What Do We Tell the Kids?

- User Submitted

This is such a serious question. Thank you. Whoever asked this question, I thank you for your vulnerability. Um, it says, my husband lost his job and we're struggling. What do we say to our kids? I feel guilty. We don't have the savings we should for this kind of thing. So what two things we're looking at here first is we're, we're living in a time where our economy, everything seems to be tightening. That that's just, it seems to be a reality. And I think that that, uh, is a great opportunity to teach our children economic awareness, financial understanding. So the openness here is, look, mom and dad are, we're trying to find solutions, but the reality is, is from a financial perspective, it's not easy on us right now. You don't have to give all the details, but I think it's appropriate to say, you know, we're gonna need to cut back on some things. We're gonna need to be careful because as we work through this, you know, things might open back up. But right now, with that out of a job, we've got, you know, we've gotta tighten the belt and we've gotta be cautious and careful. And you're ultimately teaching your children, uh, what I would say is a form of financial accountability and financial literacy. Look, we, these things happen and they're happening more and more often be because our economy is shrinking right now. There's, there's just, that's, I mean, we've got inflation. We've got less dollars to spend because of inflation. That's, that, that's our current reality. But we also wanna teach our children that, that our economy's very cyclical. It goes through cycles, right? We went through the 2008, 2009, 2010 housing bubble. That was, you know, we went through that. We went through the.com bubble. So we've been through these things before. And so helping our children understand, look, this is part of the cycle, and, and we've, we've been through situations and we're gonna, right now, we're gonna have to be careful and, and, and cautious, and we don't have the resources that we used to have. So just be aware that there might be some financial changes as we go through this time while dad tries to stabilize and get a job, or whoever's gonna be the breadwinner, however you're gonna do that. So, so I think that openness and transparency can be done appropriately. Not creating all this fear, the sky is falling and all so forth, but, but working to see is, okay, we're gonna work to find as many solutions as we can, because that's what we do. And, and we're resilient and we'll figure it out.

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Picture of Dr. Kevin Skinner

Dr. Kevin Skinner