Here’s how one psychologist says you talk with your children about mass shootings

There are roughly 15,000 public schools in Canada, and in the wake of the deadly shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., many students and parents are wondering if their school is safe.

“The answer is yes,” said Alan Campbell, president of the Canadian School Boards Association. “Public schools remain safe across this country.”

Campbell says provinces and territories all have safe school measures in place that include lockdown procedures. Schools often use controlled entrances, visitor sign-in procedures and security cameras, but Campbell notes in some areas, doors are not locked during the day.

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“Depending on the needs that the school is filling for the community, full-time locked access, and the need to buzz in, may not have aligned with what those priorities were in past,” he said.

While it’s still too early to know exactly what happened at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on Tuesday, Campbell says many school boards will be looking for any lessons that might help them improve school safety.

“I think it’s a reasonable thing to expect that, in some jurisdictions, those conversations will happen.”

Talking to kids

Other conversations happening across the country include answering difficult questions being asked by kids and teens.

“We’re not used to hearing about a high school shooting in Canada,” said Dr. Rebecca Calais Riddell, a clinical psychologist and professor at York University in Toronto. “And so, it does threaten our security and our safety.”

Riddell says when explaining the shooting to kids, it’s important to try and stay calm.

“One of the most important things with children is to make them feel safe and secure when we’re having these conversations,” she said. “And if their caregiver can feel like they’re … calm in these unusual sorts of circumstances, that goes a long way.”

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With young people, Riddell says parents should answer honestly, without too many details, and always try to return to a place of safety.

“Keeping it to a sentence that people were hurt, but there were a lot of brave people,” she said. “And with young kids, you want to kind of get in and get out, and end with safety.”

With teenagers, however, she says there are likely to be more questions.

“They’ll have their own ideas, their own thoughts about causes,” she said, advising parents to try and limit images of what happened.

For kids of all ages, Riddell says this can be a difficult time and it’s important to be “open to the emotion.”

“The type of emotions that will be coming are high, and there’s no right way to cope with this,” she said. “In the first three days, our emotions are going to run high.”