to a 6 year old.
No, we don't normally watch the news with Liam around. As my last post pointed out, the violence is getting closer to home (literally!). He doesn't need to know about that, or about gunmen taking control of a city and killing hundreds of people.
Unfortunately he did see the news: men with guns, people screaming and fleeing, confusion.
Liam had sat down to watch a DVD, so I put it in the machine and told him to hit play after all the intro stuff finished, since I was in the middle of something. What I didn't realize was that the TV was set to channel 3, the channel that the cable feeds through, and not to channel 4, the channel that the DVD player feeds through.
So I walked away leaving the TV playing a news recap of the terror in Mumbai.
Mother of the year award for that one!
Liam watched for about a full minute before he called me back to tell me that it wasn't right, there were men with guns on TV. I moved pretty quickly once I focused in and could hear the announcer.
Liam had many, many questions and concerns about what he had seen. We answered them as honestly as we could in an age appropriate way. I don't understand why people do these things, so it makes it pretty hard to explain it to a six year old. He was then very worried about something like that happening here, what our plan would be if bad men came to our house, reminding us to call 911 and to run away. He brought up different scenarios once or twice as the day went on, but overall I think he is satisfied that we are safe, he is safe and that we will do everything in our power to keep him safe.
I just hope that I can continue to keep him safe in this crazy world.
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That's so hard. We had dramas here after our 5yo foster kid saw a special news announcement about a little girl who was abandoned at a train station by her father, two days after the foster kid had been abandoned by her father. Did I mention the special news announcement was on directly after a kids cartoon? I was so pissed.
And so followed two weeks of questions about the little girl. We talked about how she would have felt but that she was safe now. The only thing that seemed to reassure her was a photo of the little girl from a newspaper where she being held by a family member. Seeing that she was safe meant more to her than us telling her so.
I think you handled things perfectly. But if it seems to be on his mind you might find showing him photos of people who are safe with their families might help reassure him that things are okay. We avoided talking about the bad father and showing her photos of him to prevent him from being a real person to her. I'd worry the same thing about the 'bad guys' in Mumbai. Good luck.
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