Children should find out about Sandy Hook shooting from parents, professor says 1
Dr. Elissa Brown
Posted: Thursday, December 20, 2012 10:30 am
Queens Chronicle
In the wake of the shooting that left 20 children dead at an elementary school in Connecticut, parents and teachers are struggling with how to explain to 6- and 7-year-old children how and why kids their age were savagely gunned down in a classroom.
The paradox has left parents scared, confused, nervous and even angry. But Dr. Elissa Brown, an associate professor of psychology at St. John’s University in Jamaica Estates, and a child psychologist who has been working with children dealing with traumatic events since 9/11, says it’s up to parents to explain the situation.
“We need to talk to our children,” she said. “Parents should always be the source of information. If not, as they get older, they will either believe you don’t know anything or are intentionally hiding information from them.”
That, Brown added, could prompt children to seek information elsewhere when it should come from mom and dad and often that could lead to parents being in the dark about what their child knows.
“We have to handle our own discomfort and find a way to have conversations with our children about this,” she said.
Brown agrees with the suggestion to shield children from photographs or news reports of the incident and provide them with nothing more than what they are asking.
“Only enough information that the whole topic isn’t fascinating,” she specified.
Children process information differently than adults and that can often lead to reactions parents don’t understand, Brown said. In this situation, she explained that children may not understand that the killer in Connecticut will not come for them, or that their schools are not being targeted. She said children will have two main questions about the tragedy: Am I safe? Why did this happen?
A parent herself, Brown acknowledges parents are often left without a good answer immediately.
“Sometimes parents need to buy themselves a minute to think about the answer,” she explained. “We need to understand what the child is worried about.”
Dr. Brown suggested parents buy time by asking children why they are inquiring about the massacre or how they feel about it.
She also suggests varying the conversations for children of different ages because they process information at different levels depending on age.
In the end though, she acknowledges that parents may face the reality of a difficult final answer to the tragedy.
“At a certain point, we will have to give the ambiguous answer of ‘sometimes horrible things happen in the world and we don't know why,’” she said, noting that the answer is not necessarily as bad to a child as a parent may think. “Children have this amazing capacity to ask questions in a format that they can handle the answer to.”
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Thursday, December 20, 2012 10:30 am.
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