Getting the Team Together – Talking to Family About Prepping

Prepping is not a spectator sport. It requires a lot of work and effort. And it can be even harder when it feels like your family isn’t supportive. “How do I get my family on board with prepping?” is a common concern.

Let’s look at some reasons why family members might be reluctant to jump on the bandwagon.

Financial

There is no stress in a relationship like financial stress. It can be all-consuming and infect every other aspect of the household. The thing is, prepping costs money; there’s no way around that. But if the family is already struggling to keep their heads above water financially, sinking money into things that don’t have an immediate benefit might be seen as wasteful.

One approach to try in this situation is that, over time, you’ll actually save money. You’re able to feed the family tomorrow at today’s prices. Let’s be realistic, the cost of just about everything continues to increase. If you shop intelligently and make use of sales as well as coupons when they make sense, you can stock up on food and other necessities to help combat future price increases.

Hoarding

To the uninitiated, there can seem to be a fine line between prepping and hoarding. One of the differences between the two is organization. Nobody wants to live in a home where every single surface is piled high with boxes, and you have to turn sideways to make it down hallways. Not only is it stressful, it’s a safety hazard.

Keeping your preps organized and under control is beneficial to everyone in the family. Not only does it help keep the home tidy, it allows you to find what you need when you need it. A power outage is the wrong time to have to hunt through 87 different totes and boxes to find the flashlights you know you bought last month.

Passionate

Many preppers are very passionate about it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if it is shoehorned into virtually every conversation, that gets old fast for the other family members. It is possible to be too passionate, to the point that they tune you out.

Closely related to this is being focused only on end-of-the-world sorts of disasters. For example, if you constantly talk about the threat of the Yellowstone caldera blowing, after a while, it just becomes a Chicken Little situation. I’m not discounting your beliefs, just suggesting that dialing it back a notch or three may benefit your relationship with your family.

Instead of focusing on apocalyptic scenarios, talk about more mundane, and far more common, threats like job loss or severe weather.

For example, let’s say the primary breadwinner in your family lost their job due to cutbacks. It isn’t the end of the world, but it can for damn sure feel like it. If you don’t have much in the way of savings, things are going to be pretty tight until that paycheck can be replaced. But if you’ve stocked up on food and other supplies, that will help ease the strain on your pocketbook.

The most important thing is to keep the lines of communication as open as possible. Actually listen to your family’s concerns and do what you can to alleviate them.