As coverage of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida dominates the news, it becomes increasingly more difficult to shield children from these types of events. How much information is too much?
And what do we say to young children in the wake of a shooting when it becomes difficult to avoid the topic?
Of course, the age of the child matters, but the basic idea, according to New Haven clinical psychologist Nancy Horn, is to explain that there are bad things that happen in the world.
"One of them is people hurting other people and guns are a particularly bad way to hurt other people," she said. "But these bad things are rare events and each one of us has a responsibility to love other people and to not have hate and to not try to hurt other people."
Horn said that’s an important message for a couple of reasons: It says that these events are rare and lets kids know there’s something they can do about it – care for others .
She also encourages a conversation about how guns are portrayed on television.
"Ask kids if they’ve ever seen a cartoon or something where there was something really bad that actually probably really hurt a person's body and where it seems like it’s ok on the TV," said Horn. "So, you can get them to start thinking about how television doesn’t really give a real picture about how dangerous violence is to people."
When you’re talking with kids between the ages of 4 and 10 the tricky part is finding a middle ground between too much information and not enough, said Julian Ford a clinical psychologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center.
"There’s no perfect answer," Ford said. But something like, ‘well, something very bad happened and some people got hurt and we’re going to make sure that we are all safe, that everybody in our family is all ok.’"
Ford, who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder, said children want to know the adults in their life are going to keep them safe.
He advises limiting media exposure for young kids and checking in with older kids who use social media. Ford said don’t assume older kids are unaffected by violence.
"It’s really a good time for parents to just ask the kids, ‘what have you heard? And what do you think about all this and what do you think we need to do about all this?'" he said.
For households where there are kids of multiple ages, Ford encourages private conversations between parents and their older children. That, he said, will usually make them more sensitive about what they say in front of their younger siblings.
In the circumstance where a child is directly affected by an act of violence, clinical psychologist Nancy Horn said, it would be very valuable for them to get to see a therapist, even if it’s only once or twice.
