Death is an inevitable part of life. Yet for a parent it's that gray area that you don't ever want to touch upon with a child. Ever. We all want to keep our beautiful innocent children young forever don't we?
aahhhh if only(sighing)...OK, maybe not. Hey I don't want to change diapers forever!
But why not discuss this subject well before they have the opportunity to learn from an uninformed scary source? Or from other kids who maybe had a hard hitting very real approach by losing a family member from cancer. Or their favorite pet be it a goldfish or a dog. My husband and I had that reality just recently. Our dog who is my daughters playmate and 'best fwend dog' as she calls him got sick. He ended up having a walnut sized cancerous tumor growing on his stomach lumen(don't ask me what that is) and it turned his intestines inside of itself. He lost 19 lbs. in 9 days and we had to make the decision before we knew what the mass was whether to go ahead with the surgery or put him to sleep. Needless to say, I wept. But it hit us like a brick that if the worst case scenario was going to happen, 'how are we going to explain this to her'. I also reminded him that she would continue to ask every single day for quite a while before she gave up and moved onto something else. But Luckily for him(and his name is Lucky) he is OK now. After raking us across the coals financially, we averted the crisis situation and still have a few years to spend with our spastic, crazy lab.
Now on to a more trivial yet influential example. I'm not allowing critters in my home. I used to try to remove them humanely because of my love of insects. I am referring mostly to spiders and carpenter ants. But I have since become a mom and my protective animal instinct is very present. So now as soon as I see an insect that is not a beetle I kill it. I just have it in my mind that beetles could care less about anything other than fruit and vegetation so I assume they won't bite. Will they? Well, in any case, my daughter follows me around everywhere. So she sees that. Well, she sees everything I do. And one day my son will as well. So there is reasoning behind it. I have no idea if the spiders are poisonous or if she ever got a bite from a carpenter ant would cause a very unwanted allergic reaction. And I am already full aware though the thought freaks me out, that these things are crawling on them at night. Come on, we all know that spiders crawl everywhere at night. How else did you get that nice red bump on your leg? Then there's my husband. Killing bees, flies, and anything else that creeps him out. (Or scares him regardless if he admits that or not) He even started talking about eradicating the adorable little chipmunks on our property lately! I had to be their advocate though because they don't really do anything to us. However think about it, they are rodents. And they are dirty and can still spread parasites and diseases with their urine and feces.
Then there's today's TV, movies, influence of other kids, and even something as simple as clothing, at any given moment it can come up. Look at the movie Toy Story.(my daughters new favorite movie!) Woody the cowboy pushes Buzz Light year out the window because he's jealous that he's taking all of Andy's playtime. At which time all the toys begin to yell at him and call him a murderer as they believe Buzz died in the fall. Obviously they realize later that he isn't dead, but that's just one example.
Granted, my child may only be just under 3 but she is extremely intelligent. So much so that she has already used the words kill, die and dead. And not in the right form. So at some point sooner than later I will have to talk to her about it. So, in doing research on the topic I found a site that offers a list of books that teach kids about death in an honest, yet gentle way. Here's the link for those that are interested. I hope this helps in your quest to teach your kids about death and I do hope you plan to anyway. After all as king Mufasa says in 'The Lion King', 'We are all a part of this great circle of life'.
http://www.parenthood.com/article-topics/books_that_teach_children_about_death.html
No comments:
Post a Comment