Children in the yard are talking to a woman upstairs:
— Will Vasya come out and play?
— Vasya has died.
— Could you throw us the ball then?
To me, this illustrates the fact that children are more resilient than we think maybe because different things end up traumatic to them compared to adults? Death of a child seems a hundred times more traumatic to the parents the to this child's peers. Divorce too — parents will tiptoe around that with the kids while they might not care that much.
The picture of someone force feeding a child is deeply disturbing, and the description of this well-trained child is even more so. Sounds like a perfect traumatic experience to me! (Some of my friends went through this as little kids, and now it's hard to quantify the trauma or to know whether it affected them in any way)
Yeah, it's difficult to know when to intervene and when it's best to just let the child handle it. In another conversation I had on the subject I think the standard we kind of unconciously adopted with my son was to wait for him to come to us. Certainly we were attentive to signs of distress, but we didn't bring it up. I wonder with your friends, if there's any correlation between how much parents and friends treated the situation as traumatic and how traumatic they view it now. (Though such a thing might be tough to disentangle even on the level of anecdote)
There is a (distasteful, sorry) russian joke:
Children in the yard are talking to a woman upstairs:
— Will Vasya come out and play?
— Vasya has died.
— Could you throw us the ball then?
To me, this illustrates the fact that children are more resilient than we think maybe because different things end up traumatic to them compared to adults? Death of a child seems a hundred times more traumatic to the parents the to this child's peers. Divorce too — parents will tiptoe around that with the kids while they might not care that much.
The picture of someone force feeding a child is deeply disturbing, and the description of this well-trained child is even more so. Sounds like a perfect traumatic experience to me! (Some of my friends went through this as little kids, and now it's hard to quantify the trauma or to know whether it affected them in any way)
Yeah, it's difficult to know when to intervene and when it's best to just let the child handle it. In another conversation I had on the subject I think the standard we kind of unconciously adopted with my son was to wait for him to come to us. Certainly we were attentive to signs of distress, but we didn't bring it up. I wonder with your friends, if there's any correlation between how much parents and friends treated the situation as traumatic and how traumatic they view it now. (Though such a thing might be tough to disentangle even on the level of anecdote)