My husband I like to watch crime solving shows. As we do realize that they are not appropriate for small children, we will either wait until they are in bed or we watch them while they are actively playing in the other room. On occasion, however, the children have wandered into the room during the show which gets one of 2 reactions, depending on which child it is... 1) Nothing. This is from the 3 year old. He says nothing and does nothing, it's like it doesn't even phase him, but then, later he does pretend to shoot things. AND 2) a whole bunch of questions from the 6 year old. He first wants to know if the show is real. Then he wants to know how the person died and who killed them. He then wants to know all about the science that they are using to find the killer. We are honest with him as much as possible, the questions are usually answered like this: No, it's not real, it's all just pretend, no one is really dead. In the pretend show the lady died because someone shot her with a gun, that's why guns are a bad idea, they hurt people. We don't know who killed her yet, that's what they are trying to figure out. I don't know how the chemicals all work, but it's really cool to watch. Then, he either stays for a few minutes (by this time the gruesome stuff (usually all at the beginning) is over and it's all science and crime solving anyway, or he goes back to whatever he was doing before.
The other night, at 2:30AM, I get woken up by a very upset 6 year old. He taps me rapidly on the shoulder, and in a very nervous, half crying, half worried voice says:
"Mommy, Mommy, Oh, oh, I am bleeding out, I AM BLEEDING OUT!!"
My first inclination was to stop and explain to him that "bleeding out" means that you are loosing all of your blood and are going to die, but I didn't say anything and just calmed him down and helped him clean up his foot. As I did this it occurred to me by how upset he was that he already knew that "bleeding out" meant losing all of your blood and that in his mind, the fact this small scab had come off, meant he was going to die. Don't worry, we applied pressure and stopped the bleeding. We expect him to make a full recovery.
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2 comments:
As a concerned grandmother of 11, I suggest you never watch those shows when the kids are awake. As you may remember Jaclyn was forced to watch scary things on TV by her older siblings and it led to a indescribable fear of clowns...(which I believe continues to this day)
That was Andrea, not me, I don't watch scary movies. In fact, I remember watching the scary clown movie for only about 10 minutes with Andrea (long before Jaclyn ever saw it) and ran out of the room thinking it was the scariest thing I had ever seen. I would never do that to my children OR my sisters...
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