Prepping the Kids

Recently, we’ve begun taking one of the most critical steps we can in prepping: Preparing our children.

I’ve got a couple of kids, early teen and near teen. Mostly I’ve been shielding them from the news, which I think is generally correct for younger kids. 6 year olds have enough things to deal with in life just being alive without having to also figure out how to handle watching the evening news¹.

I was born somewhere in the gas crisis and lived through the 80s inflation crisis as a very young child, and there is no way my upbringing would have been improved if I’d been exposed to those and tried to worry about that at the time².

By the grace of God, I live a comfortable life right now. Even all the rumblings in the distance at the moment have largely left my life unchanged. I work from home now, and prefer it in my personal situation anyhow. I have not lost my job. I’ve not suffered as much as some other people.

And by God’s grace, my children have never lived hardship³. I’ve at least been below the poverty line before, but even so did OK. They’ve only lived lives of comfort and prosperity.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken a step that we’ve never taken before, which is that we’ve started to prep the kids.

You may or may not disagree with me on whether we should already have been doing so, to which all I can say is, I’m playing it by ear based on where my own children are in life. For various reasons, it hasn’t necessarily been something we could do sooner. My oldest trends a bit young for his age (despite our best efforts) and my youngest is prone to anxiety, so I’ve not wanted to freak them out too much. In the parlance of the day, “Don’t @ me.”

But we’ve begun introducing them to the reality of the situation. We may not be in this house in a couple of years. We may be much poorer. We may not have many things we take for granted. We may not have access to the food we prefer. The life you live today is not guaranteed.

As I write this, we’re testing out some of the dried beans I bought to experiment with how to cook them and make them palatable for the family⁴. I’m introducing the idea that our food quality may be going down and that they probably ought to make an effort to be able to eat this.

We’re down to one prescription drug in the family, and we’re trying to figure out if there’s some other way we can address the problem, in anticipation of the day the medical system simply becomes unavailable to us without submission to the god of this world.

Maybe it won’t come to that. And probably no amount of prep is really possible for us to be ready to be totally evicted from the economic system. But we can at least front-load some of the pain.

We’ll be amping up their level of awareness of what is going on more and more over the next few months. We’re trying to balance this with a few other facts as well.

First, God says he will provide. But he only promises the necessities, not filet mignon and lobster every day, and sometimes his provision is that he takes you Home. But he will provide.

Second, less important on the grand scale but for a child still important is that Mom and Dad are doing their best and will continue to do their best. But there’s no guarantees from us.

Will hard times make good men? Well… I’m going to try my best.

May God use us productively in these times.

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