Protecting Children from Bad News.

thorsoak

Padstow wrote: »

Aberfan was a natural disaster, like Earthquakes.

How to explain Dunblane?

Dunblane, like Hungerford, were horrific carnages which cannot be explained away.

I do know that the children who saw Michael Ryan kill their mother in Savernake forest were told that the man who did that was a very wicked man who later killed himself. Their school friends were told the same. I understand that their father moved away from the area in the months after the massacre.

Andy Murray was in the class below that which was massacred at Dunblane, and he has said that no-one talked about it - not even to each other - although he thinks that they did have counselling at school.

I can offer no explanations at all .

GobbledyGook

I don't understand why you would take your children along. I get the feeling of wanting to help, but I don't understand why you'd want to get in the way (as in the ones who turned up to search when not asked too) or risk your child finding anything.

I actually think people don't think about what they could face when they help out in these kinds of searches. I bet most of them were searching for a lost little child - they weren't thinking about the fact that if anything was to be found it would likely be deeply unpleasant (at best).

Through circumstances I'm probably more open with my children than most. They know that there are bad people in the world and, sadly, they know that people that can seem good can turn out to be bad. We balance it up with riding their bikes (DD1's big obsession the first time we ever had a big talk about it). They've ridden their bikes tonnes of times and once or twice they've fallen off and hurt themselves. That's what people are like - the vast majority of the time people are good, but very occasionally they are not. So whilst we protect ourselves with helmets we must keep riding our bikes because we'd miss out on so much if we didn't.

My girls also decided that there are two heavens. One for the bad people where they learn to be good and one for the good people who can have fun with no bad people at all, no queues for anything (DD2 is impatient and hates queueing) and where nothing costs money so everyone can do what they like.

dizziblonde

I'm the child of two journalists - as such I probably grew up more with the news on and knowledge of the ills of the world than many kids did (my mum would charmingly tell me I had to get my school photo done - I hate getting my picture taken - "In case you get abducted or murdered so I've got one to give to the police"). Everything's always been explained to me that there are sometimes bad or very ill people in the world and they do some very wrong hurtful things and it's very sad when it happens. I think that's probably the best way to describe it - that sometimes very sad things happen.

I think taking kids on the search for that little boy was wrong though and very much dislike the whole grief public bandwagon that's crept in to our culture these days - but that's a personal thing of mine. It's almost become a bit of a "must be seen to be DOING something to be part of this" thing these days (even down to the "share this on your facebook if you feel sad over it" - must be seen to be publicly "feeling sad")

As a semi-related note - I was doing my two weeks observing in a school prior to starting teacher training when 9/11 happened. Even kids whose families never had the news on the TV were coming into school talking about it and needing to just get what had happened figured out in their heads - even the very youngest kids just had to get it all straight in their minds. Kids take in more than we give them credit for lots of the time.