Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Boston terror and my second grader.

I really wanted my son to have the carefree kind of childhood that I had, but at the same time I felt it was more important for my son to learn about things had happened in the past that he was likely to hear about and things that were currently happening. I had to tell him about the relative who died in the Oklahoma bombing because it often comes up in family conversations. He saw some of the 9-11 coverage when he was preschool age. I told him that when he was a baby I thought a monster tornado was headed straight for us and all I could do was get in a downstairs bathroom and cover him with my body knowing that I needed to be underground to survive if it hit us. I wanted him to be weather aware, for his own safety. We recently drove home on a highway where a monster tornado touched down less than 15 minutes later. We saw the huge horrible thing forming.

My 15-year-old son does not seem like he was harmed in any way by learning about awful tragedies. He deals with this kind of thing much better than I do. I sometimes wonder if my lack of bad experiences in childhood left me less able to deal with things. I am the one feeling like life has just become so weird and out of control and that everything is the opposite of the way it should be and that the more statistically unlikely something is, the more likely it is that it will happen. We just keep getting slammed with statistically unlikely weird stuff.