As a parent I do feel part of my role is to prepare my kids for the real world.  Obviously I’m explaining it in baby bite sized steps, starting by explaining about all the good things in the world and how they can achieve them if they’re prepared to try and to work hard.  But the world has two sides to it and I feel as I progress through my parenthood journey it’s my duty to tell my kids about some of the more unsavoury aspects of the world.  We’ve had the talk about not talking to strangers which he understood, but at age three a child is likely to agree to what you tell them to.

It’s around the age of four and five that they’ll start asking ‘why?’ to everything and from six onwards I expect to be hearing the counterpoint to everything I say.

If there’s been a death, a divorce or some natural or man-made disaster then you probably will have to explain why such and such a person is no longer around.  But even then some parents will still avoid telling the child, it’s quite understandable after all, we may not be ready ourselves to talk about it.  If we haven’t come to terms with the loss it’s very hard to accept that such an event happened much less explain the whys and wherefores to a child.

I read a beautiful passage in Tony Robbin’s book Awakening the Giant Within about how to explain death to a child.  It goes along the lines of using a caterpillar to butterfly analogy, in that you explain how a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly and flies away.  The analogy goes along the lines that all the caterpillars are sad that their caterpillar friend has gone, but they don’t realise that she has turned into a beautiful butterfly and is now flying around freely and happily.  If the other caterpillars knew how happy the buttterfly now was then they (the caterpillars) wouldn’t be sad.

So when is the right time to explain to them the realities of life?

If you are not pressed by any specific set of circumstances to explain these things to your children, when is the right time to start to explain some of the harsh realities of life to our children?

Me, personally I take the approach that you only have your childhood once.  When you are an adult this terrible thing called responsibility comes along.

Yes you can still have fun, absolutely, there’s lots of fun you can have and still fulfill all your responsibilities.  But when you are a child you are absolutely free and now is the time to explore and learn.  I think explaining things like death, disease, divorce, war, terrorism etc. should be kept away untill the child has a good understanding of all the positive things in the world, like love, happiness, sharing, education etc. There’s various pieces of reseach that say a child’s personality is fully formed in the first five years of thier life, unless you are forced into a situation where you have to explain the negative aspects of life to your child I think it’s better to empower them and set their attitude to be one of positvitiy.  Sure enough once they enter higher schools, they will be taught rigidity and conformity, but untill then should we as parents shouldn’t stiffle thier positive development?

Recently I was explaining the concept of not wasting water and food, i.e. not to keep the tap on for ages, not to throw food and water on the floor.  I explained that there are some children in the world who don’t have water or even food.  I said that if we’re lucky enough to have water then we shouldn’t waste it as they’d be a lot of children in the world who would be happy for a fraction of what we are wasting.  I contemplated what to do if my boy didn’t heed my advice and continued wasting water, whether I should show footage of famine to explain the point that we are very lucky to be living here in the ‘abundant’ West.  Luckily enough I didn’t need to take that step.  But would I have done it?

I did recently after much trying to persuade my boy to either brush his teeth properly or let me brush his teeth for him have to resort to showing him what happens to people who don’t brush thier teeth properly.  There were lots of gruesome videos for this, I picked the least alarming one (it’s still pretty alarming) and the one that showed the science of it and how to redeem the situation.  I did and still do feel bad for having done that, but now either he brushes his teeth properly or lets me brush his teeth for him – there’s probably some clever name for this, like neo-post-classic-ethics-theory (if not I copyright it).

If the time should ever come to explain the realities of famine, war or terrrorism, talking about it will only explain so much, it’s those images on the news that sadly hold so much shock at the evils that humans can inflict on each other that will teach.  Apologies if this post comes over a bit negative, I think 99% of parenting is fun and happy, but it’d be remiss not to consider how to handle some of the more unsavoury aspects that one may have to deal with.

Thanks so much for reading, let me know  your thoughts, whether you’ve had to do this and how you broached the subject.