Children do better in outages when they know the script. Show them the radio, the meeting place, and the rule about generators and closed garages. Let them practice the headlamp and the paper map. Fear shrinks when the next action is obvious.

The generator rule is not optional color. A generator indoors or in a closed garage kills, and a child will not invent that fact in the dark. Say it plainly, more than once. Show the radio’s on switch and the station you actually use. A meeting place is a specific corner, not “near school.”

Schools will not have your household plan. Put a card in the backpack with a local phone that is a landline if you still have one, a meetup, and an out-of-area contact. Out-of-area still works as a relay when local circuits are jammed — if any circuits remain.

The card is paper because the phone in the backpack may be dead or useless. A landline is worth writing if you still have one, because it fails differently from a cell tower. An out-of-area contact is a person who can take two calls and connect them: you say you are at the meetup, the other parent says they are delayed. The relay fails if no circuit remains. It is still worth having when the only failure is a jammed local site.

Tell the school what they are allowed to know: who may pick the child up, and where you will go if the building releases early. They will follow their own emergency plan first. Your card does not override them. It gives the child a next step when the building plan ends and the household plan begins.

Tell them the truth at the scale they can use: the lights may go out, we have water, we stay together.

A named job completes the truth. One child listens for the radio at the top of the hour. One checks that the water is where it was. An older child knocks on a specific neighbor’s door with an adult, not alone. The job should be real and small. Busywork is insulting, and a child can tell.