If a child has been taught that life is full of unicorns and fairy princesses who dispense light and magic wherever they go, of course it's going to be a bit too shocking to see people plummeting to their deaths. A certain intellectual progression has to happen, and I'd expect an adult sheltered from reality to be easily distraught as well without having been properly taught.
I keep coming back to this. It doesn't make sense to me. I have never hidden the reality of death from my children or taught them to believe that life is a happy unicorn merry-go-round. Regardless, seeing innocent people plummet to their deaths as the result of a heinous, cowardly surprise attack would certainly be more than a bit shocking to them.
I see no way to "properly teach them" not to be shocked by it. I hope not to teach them this, in fact.
Okay. Fixed. You're right that it's inherently somewhat shocking or at least surprising to see people fall from a skyscraper during an unprecedented terrorist attack-- but in context the point was, of course, that people can learn to tolerate such things so that they're not incapacitated by them, not that we should be blase about sudden catastrophes. We can zero in on a single word typed in a post and ignore the rest of the post, or we can move on and discuss the actual ideas we're presenting to each other.
Thanks to the way my son has been introduced to the topic of 9/11 and many others, I can have a healthy discussion with him about world political events without whitewashing or hiding anything. He would have arrived at his current level of understanding at some point anyway, unless he lived in a locked room without access to media; he has just arrived at it earlier than many people do, but this fits with his accelerated intellectual development. I see no more reason to shield him from truths he's ready to learn than I do to lie to him about Santa Claus when he's figured out the fake.
