Explaining Your Personal Injury Case To Your Child

When you’ve got kids in the house, you’ve got to learn to be a filter and a translator. They’ve got questions about every aspect of life, and will look to you for many of the answers. Suffering a personal injury at work can be a life-changing event for the entire family. Explaining it to children with care can make things run smoother at home and help you bond as a family in a hard time.

Scale Appropriately

Of course, not all children are going to get the same talk. Judge how much you child can handle based on their age and emotional maturity. At a base level, be honest with them that you got hurt and the other party needs to make up for it. Going into details about how it happened and the many complications of court can be confusing and stressing for a young child. If you’ve got several kids, you might want to give them different talks. In that case, make sure the older one knows that they’re getting more information and why. No matter the age, at the end of the talk let them ask questions and answer as well as you can. They could be stressing about something you’d never think to address on your own.

How’s Life Going to Change?

Your kids don’t need to know the nitty-gritty of the court process, most important is what’s going on at home. Make sure to address how you expect life at home will change. Maybe you’ll need to recuperate in the hospital, or you’re going to be doing so at home. If you need new special accommodations, let them know if you’ll be making changes to the house. These could include making it wheelchair-friendly or that you’ll need to lay down and rest more often. Breaking it down into the day-to-day changes will help ease the kids into this stressful time.