Whoever did that it sounds like they were actively trying to harm you. I’m sorry to hear that.
Definitely so.
But my point is some things stay with a person their whole lifelong. Whether forced, or accidental or random.
I’d be careful with what a kid is exposed to. Visual, auditory or even smells can be incredibly long memories. You don’t want to add to it, if you can help it. Somethings have to be discussed, like gun safety or stranger danger. But somethings can be avoided til the child is old enough to separate reality from theory.
IMHO
My theory (as a non-parent) is that kids like to know about worse-case scenarios because they want to understand how it can affect them. “If there was a car accident and mom and dad where no longer there to take care of me, what will happen?” “If I get really sick, what happens? How do I get better? What happens if I die?” “If there’s quicksand (because kids always think of quicksand), how do I get out?”
Think of all the old movies - Disney movies always had people who’d lost either one parent or both. Bambi, Snow White, Cinderella. Fairy tales are full of stories with orphans having to succeed on their own. Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Repunzel. I don’t think Shirley Temple ever had a movie where she had two parents.
Mostly kids want to know that bad things happen, but there are plans in place to care for them.
StG
My kids were about that she when 9/11 happened. When i picked them up from school, a parent handed me a piece of paper that said, “you need to talk to your kids about this. They will learn about it tomorrow at school. You should tell them first.”
I talked to my kids about it, of course. But i turned off the TV before i picked them up, and didn’t turn it on again until they stopped covering it. I didn’t want my kids to fall asleep to visions of people jumping off the towers.
In general, i think if the kid asks, it’s good to answer. I think it’s scarier if adults won’t talk about something. That’s different from you bringing up morbid topics. That’s generally a bad idea, i think.
I would lean on the wonderful resources available these days, like Wikipedia and reputable medical sources. No matter how knowledgeable you might be, looking up the subject might teach both of you something. It would also teach him how to search for stuff and how to make good judgements on the quality of the results.
When I was much younger, my mom (who was reasonably educated in many ways) bought the family an encyclopedia, the 1950’s equivalent of the internet. I spent many, many hours looking up subjects, both for knowledge and entertainment.
I still have that encyclopedia (you can’t give them away now). I use it mostly to see what we knew, and didn’t know, 70 years ago. For example, Pluto was a planet, the world’s political geography was different, Big Bang vs. Steady State Universe was being debated, and plate tectonics wasn’t yet a thing.
Overall I took the same approach you have. To the extent that I sometimes suspected her friends were sending her home with their questions to ask me. And there were times that I gave a general answer without going into the specifics, like of sex, for example.
If she pushed for more I would say “Some knowledge is like a heavy suitcase, you need to let Mommy carry it for you until you are big and strong enough to carry it yourself.” And she accepted that. Sometimes her Dad would tell her things and she would come home saying it was “too heavy for her.”
The hardest line for me was between mirroring empathy for the victims and upsetting my child. I wanted to be able to inform her without leaving her sobbing, but I also didn’t want to treat painful subjects like academic curiosities. That was always a tough one.
Usually these things came up in our commute in the car. She’d be in the back in her booster seat and me in front driving. So if she got upset I had little chance to console her. So sometimes I’d say “That’s a Big Chair topic.” Which meant we’d discuss it when we got home and could cuddle up together in the big recliner.
But in general, picking my brain was her favorite pastime, and I enjoyed it as well. So much we want to teach our children about the world, and so much they need to know. Those talks are what I miss most about her childhood.
When I lived in my old town, a local college professor did a public presentation about Civil War-era medicine, and I went. It was really obvious from the audience that there was a 5th grade teacher who had offered extra credit to any student who attended, and in the Q&A, a girl sitting by me asked if smallpox, which was in the news at the time (mid to late 00s) was a big problem. He said, and I personally already knew, that while smallpox vaccination existed, few people had it, and most soldiers, if they hadn’t had the vaccine, would have already had and survived the disease by the time they were old enough to enlist. Afterwards, I told the girl that she asked a really good question.
A woman on another website said that her 6-year-old son asked her what abortion was, and she told him that it was a grown-up thing. She was criticized for this, and I was too for agreeing that she said the right thing, but really, no matter what one’s opinion may be about abortion or how they plan to explain it to their kids, a 6-year-old is not going to have the life experience to understand it, even if it’s just the medical definition, which is a pregnancy that ends for any reason before the baby can survive outside the womb.
Very young children might just nowadays be told at first that 9/11 was a day a long time ago when something really bad happened, and everyone in the world was really sad.
America wasn’t all happy and carefree before that day, so I wouldn’t tell him that.
It’ll also teach something really important: that it’s OK to not know everything, Mommy doesn’t either and this is normal.
If he’s asking, I’d answer. I agree that very likely part of what he’s asking is what would happen if and what he should do if.
It’s also a pretty morbid sentiment
“In the before times, life was good. But ever since the Big Day, the world has been bleak.” Not what a kid wants to hear.
The most important thing to impart when discussing tragedy with a kid, in my opinion, is a reason to be hopeful and optimistic.
Mr. Rodgers once said that his mother taught him to “look for the helpers.”
You could tell Wee
“There are people who are angry or scared who will hurt others, and when that happens it’s a tragedy. But that’s not most people. Most want to help others and be kind. We know that because anytime there is a tragedy we see people showing up to help. Those helpers are the sign that things will get better.”
If you explain something like 9/11, explain the story of all the brave people who ran to help. Yes, there was a big disaster, because there are angry people in this world who want to hurt others. But then thousands, if not millions, of people, did everything they could to help make it better.
I think you have a good approach here, answering his questions, but wrapping things up if they start to get too detailed or obsessive. Also taking account his emotional state. My experience is with younger (pre-school) children, so I don’t know how much it directly applies to slightly older kid. The pre-school where I work has rules saying no gun play or gory pretend play, which is mostly to protect other kids who were getting upset. Maybe that is a rule he can understand, not to talk about guns or death at school. The other thing is watching his play. If those things are coming up a lot in when he plays, it means he is thinking about them, and might need some more conversations or books or stories that can help him contextualise.
Honestly some small boys just have this incredible ability to find anything gun related.
A lady I was friends with lived on a tiny island with a close-knit basically hippy community. Everything her little kids watched at home was checked first for no violent scenes, she’d only even watch news after they’d gone to bed.
The daycare the kids went to was no TV, no screens, definitely no toy guns there or at home. As it was such a tiny place, she knew all the other parents, and all were of a similar view, they’d literally had meetings about what were and were not acceptable toys at the start of the year, and everyone had said they didn’t allow toy guns at home… and her 2 year old came home from his first day at daycare, picked up a stick, aimed the end at one of their chickens and yelled ‘BANG!’
They do the same kinda thing with toy cars.
I’ve seen little boys use all manner of little objects as cars and go “vroom-vroom” while pushing it along a surface.
You’re already keeping the answers to what your kid can deal with at that age. That’s good! Two stories about not pushing beyond that.
When my son was about 5, and reading, we drove past a mini-mall and he asked “What’s an adult toy store?” Yup, he read the sign. Rather than get into the whole thing, my wife said it was where people bought basketballs, game systems, and the like. One of the few times we lied to the lad.
When I was 4 my Mom was heavily pregnant with my sib. She’d already outlined the facts of life to me, at my level. When she tells this story, she says that at the end of an exhausting day I asked her “If the baby is in the mommy’s tummy, how does the baby get out?” She sat down and got ready for a big explanation. She said “Well, there’s a very special place …” And I said “Oh, the delivery room!” and turned around and walked away.
A point that no-one else seems to have emphasised so far: a lot of old ‘childrens tales’ which have since been sanitised into modern versions or Disney, were pretty dark and gory…
In our case we always tried to tell our children the truth at their comprehension level.
Yes, there are bad people in the world. It is wise to be careful. But there are good people too.
Trust but verify, and all that…
Another 9/11 point is that over 15,000 people were in the WTC at the time of the attack (NIST estimated over 17,000). Well over 10,000 made it out. That was in part because of preparation after the bombing in '93. I remember news stories at the time of office workers carrying their disabled colleagues down the stairs, a lot of stairs. Look to the helpers, indeed. I remember a comment in October '01 describing the WTC attack as the greatest rescue operation in history. Likely hyperbole, but it makes a point.
Someone told me when my children were very young “Answer the question that is asked. You don’t have to elaborate, justify or quote cites”
Hey, that’s a problem I have on the Dope. Staying on topic and re-reading or thinking about the question the OP is asking. I tend to veer, on here.
In RL, with my speech difficulties, I don’t do that.
Agreed. Very often the answer to the question, “Why is the sky blue?” is “To make little boys ask questions.”
Kids are naturally curious and ask questions, often described as “a phase”. Many grow out of it; the ones that don’t, become scientists.
He somehow figured that out on his own. He estimated that 10,000 survived.
The only thing he really seemed to get stuck on was what happened with the flight that went down in Pennsylvania. He doesn’t understand human motivation very well in general. Understanding the last brave and desperate acts of people condemned to die was difficult to explain.
He asked me if all the people who got hurt were better now. I explained that sometimes you can heal quickly physically but it takes a long time emotionally. You can still be upset by something that happened a long time ago.
“Even twenty-five years later?”
Even so. I told him I wasn’t even there, but I still get emotional about it when I watch those videos.
I did tell him all about the helpers, and he asked me what I would think if he had risked his own life to rescue people. I told him it would be very hard to know he was in danger, but I also understand sometimes you do what you have to do. Then he told me he didn’t want me to risk my life.
Maybe he’ll be ready for the boatlift thing next year. I think he would like it.
I don’t think he’ll ever stop asking questions. Neither I nor his father ever have. He posseses his father’s natural skepticism, too.
At that age we worked very hard on the difference between real and pretend violence. I know that developmentally little kids can’t make a distinction, but we made sure to bring it up as an explanation for why similar events could be funny or exciting sometimes and other times scary and sad. As the lines between what is real and what is pretend form, they’ll have been exposed to a difference in acceptability.
We did not try and limit what our kid watched, because they did a good job at self limiting when something made them uncomfortable, and as many people here mentioned, the restrictions don’t matter very much either way. The whole “imitating violence” thing is bunk and pseudo-science, and kids learn about guns, fighting, and stuff even when their consumption is restricted.
I think kids being interested in morbid things is very normal, and as said, answer the question, and don’t worry about elaborating too much. Kids at that age do not want a lecture on cultural norms when they ask why we eat cows but can’t eat the cat. “The cat is a pet,” might be all the explanation they need.