My child got upset when I told her that the neighbor’s dog had died. Would it be better for children’s mental health if they didn’t know everything? In the childhood of many adults, secrecy was common, and it caused confusion.
Our neighbor the dog died.
The dog had not really cared about the children, but my children had been interested in it. Sometimes it was even tried to pet the animal. One of my first child’s soft toys is also named after the dog.
I decided to tell the sad news to the children when we sat together at the dinner table. My five-year-old firstborn’s reaction was swift and merciless: Why did you tell us this?
Oops, I thought to myself.
Death has raised questions in the firstborn for years. My children’s father and I have tried to give honest but child-sized answers.
At dinner, I wondered if the child had nevertheless internalized the strange idea that children should not be told difficult things.
And that’s not it – when my husband later came home from work and I mentioned to him that I had told the children about the dog’s death, his first reaction was also a question.
“Oh, you told me, didn’t you?”
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I can only imagine how it feels to deal with things involving mass graves with a child.
If there has been happiness in life, the parent of a child of playful age may consider how to tell the child about the death of the neighbor’s dog, or whether to tell.
In more difficult situations and with older children, there are bigger questions to deal with.
How should one talk about a pandemic or a war? What about the climate crisis, environmental loss or mass extinction? Should we explain the global energy crisis or the effects of the recession, consider together the possibility of nuclear war?
I haven’t had to explain anything more difficult than corona to my children yet. When it started, the firstborn was so small that we could only tell about a runny nose in motion, which can become really painful.
Therefore, I can only imagine how it feels to deal with issues involving mass graves or extinctions with a child.
Finnish young people are already anxious. According to THL’s School Health Survey girls are significantly more anxious than boys. Almost every third girl studying in primary school, upper secondary school or vocational school has experienced moderate or severe anxiety.
In addition, young people’s faith in the future of the world has weakened. The report commissioned by the Foundation for Children and Youth less than half of 16-30 year olds believe that humanity wants or is able to solve major global problems.
In the midst of all this, many adults surely wonder if it would sometimes be smarter to spare the children and keep quiet about the world’s problems.
Basically, adults might also want to save themselves.
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Honest talk can save a child from self-blame, anxiety and depression.
When my five year old asked why I told him about the dog’s death, he most likely meant why I wanted to make him feel bad.
The child is at the heart of the matter. I don’t want to.
If an adult tells a difficult thing to a child, he has to deal with the feelings that talking about a difficult thing or the child’s reactions cause. That’s why keeping silent can seem like a better option, sums up a psychologist specializing in trauma therapy and forensic psychology, Psychotherapist Aino Juusola. He has written a book Shall we talk?which deals with how and why you should talk about difficult things with children.
According to Juusola, staying silent may be an easier solution for an adult for a while. However, the child benefits in many ways from talking about difficult things.
Above all, a small person gets experience of being able to survive difficult situations and great emotions. This increases the child’s resilience, i.e. the ability to cope with challenging situations. In uncertain times, it is especially needed, Juusola reminds.
Honest in the best case, speech can save the child from self-blame, anxiety and depression, says Juusola. This is because keeping quiet does not protect the child from things, but can lead him astray.
The human mind is such that it tries to process difficult things anyway. If a child does not get to deal with difficult themes with an adult, he may ponder things alone in his own head or have a conversation with his friends.
Both options are a bit bad. There will be misunderstandings and own interpretations, things will get blown out of proportion, says Juusola.
Like this many modern parents have experienced childhood themselves. A world where children are not included in discussions and where things are kept from them is empty and full of confusion.
Supervisor Jani Volanen interprets the atmosphere in its new series Munkkivuori (Elisa Entertainment Viaplay). In it, the children of the eighties hang around in the yard of the housing association and guess what’s going on when the parents argue, hold secret meetings, run at night with flashlights and forbid going to the forest and bike storage. The children wonder if that kind of beast, or a beast, or whatever it is, is connected to the mystery of the housing association.
The modern counterpart to this can be found in how children and young people are talked about grooming, i.e. attracting a child to sexual intercourse. Juusola has done a survey for Pelastakaa Lapset ry, in which young people were asked about their experiences on the matter.
In the survey, 15–16-year-olds said that they had already received sexual contact online when they were 11–12 years old, but did not understand what it was about at the time.
“The fact is that young people get these contacts and don’t know how to act if adults don’t tell them what they should do,” says Juusola.
According to the survey, young people talk about grooming among themselves, but the majority do not tell adults or the authorities about it, because they may be afraid of what kind of reactions this would arouse in their parents.
The fact that adults bring up even difficult topics and talk about them honestly gives children the means and space to talk.
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Talking about difficult things hardly increases a young person’s anxiety, but can reduce it.
Of course it is so much so that in this day and age it is not possible to protect a child from information by keeping silent about it, Juusola reminds.
You can try.
Someone still remembers the commotion that happened a year ago about when junior high school students from Southern Pohja were denied the agreed visits to a contemporary art exhibition that dealt critically with meat production. The exhibition included a sound installation that depicted the pigs’ last night before slaughter, and a video piece that presented the world from the pig’s point of view.
For example In an interview with HS the director of cultural affairs justified the refusal decision with the well-being of young people: young people are already tough, and we don’t want to increase their discomfort.
However, the idea of protecting middle schoolers is unnecessarily hopeful, because even six-year-olds have smartphones, says Juusola. Children and young people are exposed to material found on the Internet in any case.
The fact that children are not allowed in the art exhibition does not prevent them from thinking about intensive meat production or seeing graphic video material on the subject. An art exhibition could have offered a peaceful opportunity to focus on the topic together with others and especially with the support of an adult. By sharing experiences and thoughts, deeper, personal interpretations could have been made.
As an unfortunate contrast to this, an alternative arises where young people seek and share information with each other and are left alone with the feelings caused by it.
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Young people do not distinguish between what they can take responsibility for and what they cannot.
When talking about difficult social issues, such as animal rights or even the climate crisis, it is essential that the child understands the scale of the issue and their own possibilities of influence, Juusola reminds.
“We should talk with young people specifically about how all this affects their lives and what is not worth bearing responsibility for.”
According to Juusola, for example, young people’s climate anxiety is a lot about the fact that young people do not distinguish between the limits of their own responsibility.
We think about this with anxious young people at the reception of a psychologist or psychotherapist, but it would be good if the matter could be dealt with under the guidance of adults at an earlier stage, says Juusola.
According to him, young people are helped by the experience of standing: they can act and influence. If you can’t talk about things with adults, you won’t realize your own potential for influence either.
Difficult talking about things is therefore unlikely to increase a young person’s anxiety. Instead, it reduces it, says Juusola.
However, according to him, what is essential is that the issue is discussed openly and the child gets space to form his own opinion about it. An adult must not try to offer the child a ready-made interpretation of how the matter should feel or what one should think about it.
An adult should also try to stay calm, says Juusola. If the matter arouses a huge emotional reaction in you, you can temporarily postpone telling the matter.
On the other hand, you can also tell the child directly that the matter seems difficult to you, and you can still talk about it. In this way, an adult sets a model with his own example that it is possible to deal with big emotions, says Juusola.
“You can also always come back to things and say that I wish I had said something different before, I still want to explain.”
At our house it has been a long time with my children to have a conversation at the dinner table about what was nice about the day.
Three-year-olds answer again and again that it was nice to swing. The five-year-old usually says that the best thing has been playing with his best friend.
Today, our dinner conversation has one more question: what not-so-nice happened today?
Often the children don’t say anything to this, because in their days everything has been the best.
Later it may not be like this.
It could be that the child doesn’t say anything anymore, or it could be that his answer is so big that he can’t handle it at the dinner table.
However, I want to make sure that even then there is a space and an invitation to think about miserable things in everyday life. Because you can’t avoid them.
Read more: Can war come to Finland? Many children are now thinking about questions related to the war
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