Children indulged in days after mass shooting
There’s snow on the ground in Londonderry, N.H., about 320 kilometres north of the slaughter at a Connecticut elementary school, and dad Eric Heenan found himself in a routine fuss with his nineyear-old son over boots.
“It’s not cool to wear snow boots to school,” he said Monday, “and then I was like, you know what, God forbid the last conversation we have is this. There but for the grace of God go we.”
Parents everywhere are letting the small stuff slide, indulging their kids just a little bit, relieved, as Heenan is, to have them safe after a gunman claimed the lives 20 students and six adults in Newtown.
In Safety Harbor, Fla., close to Tampa Bay, Christie O’Sullivan feels it with her two boys, aged five and six. She returned home Friday afternoon to find a sink clogged by toilet paper and dirty tissues all over the floor of her guest bathroom as she madly tried to clean for a holiday party.
“I had to just stop and appreciate my messy bathroom,” she said. “Having a six-year-old myself and imagining him seeing this horror in his life crushes me. Just the very thought of it makes me break down into tears.”
Child experts urge, among other things, that parents worried about the reaction of their children to the Newtown tragedy maintain routines. But some also acknowledge O’Sullivan’s loving act as perfectly acceptable as she and other parents work through their grief and anxiety. At least for a time.
“It’s a very understandable, emotional reaction that we have,” said Emanuel Maidenberg, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The function is really helping parents to deal with our sense of helplessness.”
New York University’s child and adolescent psychiatry professor Glenn Saxe said: “If there is any time to be a little more flexible about routines and rules in support of our children, it is now.”
Cortney Green’s son just turned nine and got to eat leftover birthday cake for breakfast on Monday, the first day back to school for millions after the Newtown massacre.
“Other times when I’ve allowed an indulgence it is the recognition their childhoods are rapidly going by and figuring an occasional caving in does little harm in the big scheme of things,” said Green, an English instructor at a community college in Columbia, S.C.
“This time it was definitely Newtown and my apprehension about sending them off to school, knowing they are without me most of the day,” she said.
Tara Bordelon in Alexandria, La., broke one of her hard-and-fast rules: No kids in her bed at night. The social worker couldn’t wait to gather them under the covers for popcorn and a movie.
“I just want them to be innocent,” she said. “He didn’t hurt just those families. He hurt everybody.”