We all need to relax, but this is really alarming...
A few months back our team here at iBbeautiful Subscription Boxes decided to run a contest for our subscribers. Each month we curate our subscription boxes around a theme of empowerment to help inspire young girls to feel better about themselves. We thought it would be interesting to reach out to our community and get their ideas for new themes. We got a lot of great ideas, but there was one theme suggestion that seemed to appear more than most in the submittals.
Now not only moms answered, but a lot of our actual teen and tween subscribers wrote in to us and this is where it became really interesting. Mostly the moms wrote of their kids being stressed out from school and all the other activities their kids had throughout the day. Some wrote about the stress of their kids trying to fit in, but what the kids wrote to us had us in tears. I was absolutely shocked that several teens and tweens wrote to us that the root of their stress came from the fear of school shootings. Some had been directly affected and others just carried around the fear that eventually it will be their school someday. Now, I'm not saying I'm surprised kids are concerned by this...of course not! I'm just surprised that the answers to a fun contest about themes for subscription boxes came back with this heavy subject. It breaks my heart.
As an adult we've been conditioned to see these horrible events on the news and then because life is always happening we condition ourselves to just put it somewhere else in our minds. We don't forget about it, but it's not foremost because we have so many other things to take care of and get done. But for a school age child, who walks into a facility that is now associated with these types of events, and because they most likely don't have the coping mechanisms that we adults have developed, it is just front of mind for them...and that's simply horrifying.
So, since iBbeautiful doesn't hold a seat in congress, nor can we change the world, the least we could do was to offer a box this month that hopefully brought some peace and relaxation to your girls. It's filled with scents of lavender in the sachets and soaps, cozy 'Happy Heel Good' socks, and other trinkets to bring a smile to those teens and tweens.
The last thing I want to say is that I'm writing this because doing a blog post regarding each month's box is on the 'to-do' list (which most months I forget to do), but more importantly, I just wanted to shine a light on the possible issue that as parents we know our kids are stressed, but maybe we don't realize how much, how deeply, or how sometimes it's over things that even adults can't process. It's so hard to get them to open up sometimes so I thought it important to share with you what we learned.
Love + Happiness,
Team iBbeautiful