First, 12 year old Elliot Fletcher was stabbed in the chest and killed by a 13 year old schoolmate in the early hours of last Monday morning. Parents stunned at the reminder that the safety of our precious children is not a given when we hand them over to their teachers each morning.
Just a few days later, on Thursday an 8 year old Sydney girl was abducted from her home at around 1am, raped for several hours before being dumped in a park reserve. She lived, and this brave little girl was able to make her way home to her family. The thought though, of her fear, the pain she must have endured, and what she now has to live with for the rest of her life, is on the minds of parents everywhere.
And it got worse. On Monday morning news got out that another 8 year old girl was missing from her bed. Just hours later, her little body was found, dumped in a drain near her home. A man, known to the family, has been charged with her murder.
The sleepy town of Bundaberg (where my husband grew up) is in shock now, enraged that such an atrocity should happen on their doorstep. The entire country shares it.
And parents are talking. I've heard them at school. I've seen it on parenting forums. It's hard, it seems, to know where to look, who to trust with our children.
But I've been surprised at the number who are having these discussions with their very small children. Just this morning as I walked into the school with Alexander, there was a little boy, I'd say somewhere between 3 and 4 (certainly no older) standing at the gates. His mother rushed to him, and began screaming, clearly frantic.
"I told you never to run away from Mummy. We talked about this just this morning. What if some bad man had taken you and killed you? We talked about the little girl who got taken and they killed her. Do you want someone to kill you too? I didnt' know where you were, and for all I know someone might have walked away from you!".
Alexander's eyes widened, fear so evident in his innocent little face. You see, we've not had this specific discussion with him. We don't actually let him watch the news just yet, as he's so sensitive and so easily distressed. He, like his mother, and my mother before me, has a tendancy to catastrophize. He's so easily afraid, I didn't want to put yet another thing in front of him to internalize and fret about. *
We're cautious with Alexander. I was the victim of child sexual abuse (the person close to our family), so of course, we are not in a hurry to see him off having sleepovers and the like. Of course, he will as he gets older, but I'm not in a rush. We've had the stranger talk, the inappropriate touching talk. We've discussed how sometimes, bad things happen (the earthquake in Haiti, and a car accident we witnessed the aftermath of) and that some people get a very very sick or hurt and can die. He's seen me cry, for example, over the death of Olivia just a few weeks ago, and he understood how sad I was for her family.
But I've not talked to him yet about people sneaking into the house and snatching him away. I've not taught him to be afraid of things he can't control. God, I have enough fear of that for the both of us. AM I wrong? Should I have talked about it?
Have you? How much do your small (I'm talking under 10s) children know about the things that have happened this week? Is this a conversation you've had yet? To what extent? And how have your children coped?
Where is the line? How long can we keep them innocent? Are we doing a disservice from protecting them from all of this?
What do you think?
*For example - Alexander knows that my mother died when he was a baby. We were very, very careful to explain that she had a 'special kind of sickness', so that he didn't panic when he heard someone was sick, thinking they would die too. We thought he had our bases covered.
But for a long time, he used to express fear at the thought of growing up. One day (a year or more after I'd first noticed it), we were snuggling in bed, just chatting. And he said "I will miss you so much when I'm a grown up, Mummy". "Why, we can still see each other, can't we?" asked I. "But you'll die when I get grown up, just like my Nana did". I was stunned. He had thought, all that time, that when you reach adulthood, your mother has to die.
