MomsTalk: Teaching How to Cope With the Scary

The past few weeks have been full of dramatic new stories.  Between the royal wedding, the tornadoes in the U.S., and the capturing and killing of OBL there has been an influx of both wonderful and horrifying information.   Please let us know how much of these stories you shared with your children:

Jennifer Bargerstock,  Falls Church resident, married, with two sons and a daughter, one Golden Retriever, one mixed poodle-terrier, two cats.

My boys remember 9/11. Scotty was in second grade and Ben was in kindergarten in Damascus. By a weird co-incidence, I had caught the au-pair pinching Scotty’s little arms the week before, so my mom was out at the house getting the new nanny oriented.

I had my first  really big design/build bid due at NIH. They let the kids out of school. My office was in the flight path of Camp David at the time so I was watching the planes go back and forth in the scatter pattern. We had a crew in the Pentagon overnight and couldn't reach the foreman. I told my mom to keep the TV off. I just wanted to be with my boys, but I couldn’t leave the office.

When I was a student teacher, there was a four-year old in my Chaper 1 pre-school class who had survived a hurricane but lost his home around him. He was so worried about storms. Desert Storm broke out when I was teaching fourth grade. Some of the other teachers played the coverage all day long. The kids obsessed about war, bombs, killing and those oil well fires. They couldn’t understand the distance; many had never traveled far. There wasn’t a stoplight in the town I taught. Imagine how these kids saw the devastation.

We can’t keep the kids from seeing the news or hearing about scary events; but we can limit the amount of time they are exposed and be careful about our reaction to news ourselves. If we tend to be fearful, they will learn fear. I try to be open to talking about events they have seen or that I think may be topics on the playground, classroom or with their friends. Listening to their thoughts, validating their feelings about events and being non-judgemental about their reactions have helped my boys stop and think about the events and also how they are being portrayed.

We also talk about how the world we live in is mostly safe, not mostly scary. When they were little, that helped when they were overwhelmed with the stranger-danger lessons and saw villains lurking around every corner. Although they always called the bad guys “terrorists” when they played, not villains.