We wish we could protect children from every pain. We want to bundle them up and prevent them from encountering pain, grief, bullying, skinned knees, or discomfort of any sort.
The reality is, we can’t. Bad things will happen. The best we can do is help children through them.
At Baan Dek, we’ve recently had a trauma of sorts. Three tornadoes touched down in our town, and wreaked havoc on our community. One of our classrooms is “unavailable,” in the most Montessori use of the word: the tornado removed the roof and left behind a significant amount of water.
How do we cope with this? How do we help children through trauma?
(1) Be cautious with information.
It can be very tempting to keep the news on all the time when there’s a local or national crisis. It can be easy to speak casually about a car accident, or about an incident that left a family member in the hospital. We vent publicly when processing a divorce. Children are sponges, even after they’ve left that under-six Absorbent Mind period. A little bit of information can be a dangerous thing, and we don’t always realize what we’re saying until children repeat it to us.
They’re fearful at every rainstorm, they’re hesitant to get in the car, they don’t want to go to the doctor because they don’t want to die. We can’t figure out where these thoughts came from, until we realize we’ve had the news on for the past week, we are talking about someone texting and driving and causing a big accident, we casually mentioned an elder going in to the doctor for routine surgery and having an adverse reaction to anesthesia.
Information is often helpful for adults. More information is useful, we can think logically, we can contextualize and attach names, places, and other data. Information makes things less scary for us, but it often has the opposite effect for children.
This isn’t to say, hide everything and pretend nothing is happening. Children will know something is going on, and pretending it isn’t isn’t helpful. It is to say, this is one of those moments we can protect children. We can filter through the information and share selectively. We can find out the end of the story before starting it with a child. We know what will scare and what will help, and we can communicate accordingly.
(2) Ask questions and listen.
So, often, we assume. This is going to be scary! My children aren’t paying any attention to what I’m saying. I definitely explained that clearly.
Let’s take a non-traumatic example. A child asks, “where did I come from?” We take a deep breath, this is what we’ve been training for, and we start a big conversation about science and love and all kinds of big concepts.
Five minutes later, a child comes back and says, “yeah, but Sami’s family comes from Georgia, where do I come from?”
Oh my.
When something happens, talk to children, not at them. What questions do you have? How do you feel? What have you heard? Is there anything that doesn’t make sense to you?
One of the most important things in asking questions is also the hardest: giving space and staying quiet. It’s uncomfortable, especially when we want to jump in and fix or solve. Big truth sometimes requires silence and discomfort.
When we’re quiet and still and patient, we’re also holding space for contentment. Some of our biggest assumptions are that something is wrong. Our anxiety can breed more anxiety. We’re so worried something might be wrong, and children want to please us, so something MUST be wrong. When we give space, we send the message that everything is okay, whatever you’re feeling is okay, even if that’s apathy, or no discomfort with a traumatic situation. Sometimes children feel supported and loved, and what on paper could be trauma is just a small blip.
(3) Seek the positive.
Things can be scary, sometimes very scary. Trauma can make us feel like our world is crumbling, that we can no longer find North, that breathing is hard, that our very reality no longer exists. Fear can make us do crazy things.
Even in the worst situations, there is good. There are people who stand up when our world is crashing down. There are businesses who offer assistance when they really don’t have to. We find inner strength and support in one another. We find gratitude for that big expense of trimming a tree last year, since it means those branches aren’t through our windows now. We’re reminded how much fun we have together, when we’re sitting vigil in a hospital room sharing stories and memories. We learn that what we imagined was impossible, is actually quite possible, and even easier than we thought it would be.
It’s like Mr. Rogers is quoted, “When I was a boy and would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. We cannot avoid any unpleasantness or discomfort, or take it on for our children, but we can help them through it.