There’s No Manual: How to Talk About Tragedy As A Parent
I, like so many of us, stared in horror at the news ticker across my screen while doing the morning shuffle to prepare my kids for school and the busy Monday ahead.
Another shooting. 58 dead, hundreds more in mass chaos, wounded, in lockdown.
Too quickly, I realized, my son had stopped packing his Kindergarten backpack and was staring with a blank, interested stare, at the scenes of people hugging and crying, squashed water bottles, and injuries. Listening to words like “mass shooting”, “open fire” and “no motive”.
I held my breath, because I knew what the next thing that was to happen would be.
I tried hard to think of correct words as he turned to me and asked, “Why would someone shoot people, Mommy? Were they the bad guys?”
How do we answer these questions?
How can we correctly relay hard, real world information to our children, and explain that sometimes really horrible, terrible things happen, with sometimes no reason?
How can we avoid our own judgments of the situation, or keep ‘politics’ out of it when it’s such an emotionally driven situation?
Is there a right answer?
No. There’s not.
There isn’t a manual for explaining tragedy to your children. No one can coach you for it, and I think what is hardest is that when we’re blindsided ourselves by terrible news, we don’t always know how to respond to their wide, innocent eyes taking in the same sights.
So what can we do? What did I do?
I sat him down and explained to him that someone did something terrible. I gave him the facts. I encouraged him to make observations.
“So all those people there, they are helping find out why the man did that to those people?”
“Yes, sweet boy. The police, investigators, and medical teams are helping people stay safe and feel better, they are helping to find answers, just like solving a math problem at school. Sometimes I feel safer knowing that they are doing something, even if it doesn’t take away the hard and horrible things that already happened.”
“I feel better knowing that too.”
I chose not to dwell on the ‘why’. I chose not to place blame or get caught up in the background of the shooter, or what people could have done. That won’t fix the problem at hand for him and his little mind.
What will help him is knowing there are helpers, and that those helpers were hard at work trying to make the world a little safer afterwards. I
’ll have to save and reserve my own processing, my own judgments and blame, for later.
We walked to school and I squeezed his little hand tight. I can help him observe his world, make his own ideas about what can happen when wrong wins over right, and how to make some sense of all the senseless.
Show your children the good. Show them what happens after. Show them the love and the caring. That will ALWAYS win out over dwelling on the bad and what the evil has brought.
Until we can find a way to get rid of it, that’s all we have sometimes.
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