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

The child's father may or may not have actually died. The reason I say this is because one of my DD's classmates came up to me at school and told me that she was really upset that her grandfather had recently passed away. I am fairly good friends with this family (mother) so I expressed my condolences to the child and asked her how she was doing. She told me that she was in "deep mourning" over his passing, so I told her that I understood and if she wanted to talk about it she could. Later that day I called her mother to express my condolences and to let her know if she needed someone to watch her younger children during the visitation or funeral that I could help her out. The mom was absolutely stunned when I called, that her daughter was so upset and expressed that she was in "deep mourning" over the death as she had never even met her grandfather (the mom and dad were estranged). Can you say awkward?

At any rate, the information your son is passing onto you may be accurate as to how he heard it, but if you just spoke to the child's mother and nothing appeared to be wrong, then I would have to say that you might want to question the accuracy of the information passed on by the child.

That being said, I think you gave your son good advice on how to handle the child when she wants to "talk talk talk" about it.

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.

9-11, Nidal Hasan's rampage, the Boston bombings, the Woowich attack, and many other terrorist incidents are part of a jihad. My oldest two already know what religion is implicated. The schools, the media, and many politicians are too politically correct to mention certain obvious patterns, so parents need to at some point.

I completely agree with you. The issue I have is that she was only 8 at the time of the Boston bombings. If she asked, I would not lie or candy coat it but at the age of 8 I personally choose not to burden her with the weight of the world...there is plenty of time for that.