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Pre-School and Daycare
ArcticFox
member
Tragic local story/ questions about telling DD
ArcticFox
member
My DD goes to school with a little girl whose 5-year-old sister was just diagnosed with an untreatable brain tumor. She has only a few months left, it is incredibly sad.. I can't even imagine.
Anyway DD is almost 5, I know she would understand the situation if I tell her about it. Should I just tell her? I'm only wondering about DD saying anything inadvertently and upsetting the sister or other kids (for instance if the other preschoolers don't know).
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Re: Tragic local story/ questions about telling DD
If you do choose to tell her, make sure you add in that you, your DH and your daughter are ok and totally healthy. We told my 4 year old son about both his grandfather's having died and took him to a cemetary to see my dad. My son got very quiet that night and very clingy. I finally figured out that we needed to reassure him that we were ok and he was ok.
I'm so sorry for that 5 year old girl. It breaks my heart that she and her family are going through such a horrible thing.
IUI- BFN IVF #1 -BFP! Allie is our 2nd IVF baby. Born at 36 1/2 weeks after pre-e again
This is what I was thinking too. If she were older, I would initiate the conversation but at this age, I'd wait to see what she comes home saying about it.
agreed
~after 34 cycles we finally got our 2nd little bundle of joy~
My IF blog
This- esp. if it isn't a child she plays with on a regular basis herself. My older DD had a friend in preschool who had a cyst on her brain & needed surgery. Because she knew this child well, I explained that C had something growing in her brain that the doctors needed to get out. When she asked how it was getting out, I explained that she had to have some surgery to get it out. What's surgery? Doctors have special medicine that let you go to sleep for awhile & you can't feel any pain while they use special tools to open up your body & remove what isn't supposed to be there. In our situation, this was a benign medical condition, but I just answered her questions as honestly as i could in an age appropriate manner. So sorry to hear about this- it's just incredibly sad
My mom has terminal cancer, so I've had to have this discussion A LOT with my DS. Granted, in some ways it is easier to handle in our situation b/c we're not talking about the mortality of a child, but he's very close to my mom, which makes it really tough. Plus, he has to see the nitty-gritty side of everything she's dealing with (side effects of meds, surgeries, hospitalizations, etc.).
Here's a link to a post on the AP board from awhile back talking about death: https://community.thebump.com/cs/ks/forums/thread/57842986.aspx. I posted this there, but I'll C&P for ease here. There were some other good responses too, so it's worth checking out.
C&P of my response:
Oh, I feel your pain quite literally, and I'm so sorry that you and your family are going through this. Cancer is such a b!tch. My mom has stage IV cancer too, and they gave her at most a couple of months. Fortunately, she has stayed mentally strong and the treatments she's had have worked better than they expected, so she's over a year out from her diagnosis. However, we know that remission is not likely, so it's just a matter of time...How much we don't know.
My 3.5yo is very close to her, so he's had lots of questions about cancer and death. It's really hard to explain to a kid that little, but I finally found a way that he can sort of understand and give him some idea of what cancer is. We have some big wooden beads that are about 1.5in across. Some of them are square and some of them are rounded, but they all have two flat sides. (I hope that makes sense. Here is a link to something similar. The ones I have actually came from the $1 bin at Target last year sometime.)
I sorted out 5-6 square blocks and stacked them into a tower. I told him that our body is made up of lots and lots and lots of teeny tiny blocks that are so small we can't see them, but when they're all stacked together they make up our body. I said that one of our body's jobs is to make new blocks all the time to replace any blocks that get broken or lost.
Usually, our body does it right and makes all square blocks, but sometimes it makes a mistake and makes a round block instead. Then I showed him how the tower with all square blocks can take quite a bit of nudging before it falls over (it's strong), and then I made another tower of the same height but with a round block in the middle and showed him that it falls apart easily (it's weak). I told him that when our body makes a mistake and starts making the wrong blocks that it makes it really easy for us to get sick because our body isn't very strong any more.
So now he understands that Grandma's body has "bad blocks" in it and that the doctors give her special medicine that tries to get rid of the bad blocks and help her body make the right blocks again. It's not a perfect explanation, but I think it's really helped him to understand this horrible situation as well as you can possibly expect for a kid his age.
We do talk about death too b/c I know if/when something finally does happen to her it's going to hit him really hard, and it's going to be even worse that I know I'm going to be a wreck too. He's very emotionally connected to how I'm feeling still, so any prep I can do for either of us is a good thing IMO.
We are Christian, so we've talked about how G-d lives in Heaven, which is the most beautiful place ever. It has all the best things you could ever, ever imagine, and at this point, he usually starts asking if it has X toy or food or if you can watch "Bubble Guppies" with Jesus, etc. He's gotten very comfortable with the idea that Heaven is a really cool place to go.
Then the other day we drove past a cemetery, and he asked what it was. I saw it as another opportunity for a teachable moment. I asked him if he remembered how we talked about going to Heaven to live with G-d, and he said that he did. I told him that when you go to Heaven, you don't need your body any more.
I asked him if he ever noticed that he could sit and think about things that he'd like to do or say in his head without actually talking about them. So, then I said that all the parts that are in his head helping him to have those thoughts are the parts that go to live with G-d.
So if all those parts go to live with G-d but you don't need your body, your body stays here, and we need a place to put it where our friends and family can come to visit when they are missing the person that went to Heaven. So, we put their body in the cemetery and make it a very special place to go to visit if we miss the person, and then the person that went to Heaven can look down on us and be with us too...kind of like when we send pictures to Grandma so that she can see what we've been doing even though she isn't right here with us when we do it.
It's not perfect, but it's helped my DS (and me too). Don't think that this has happened all at once either. I've had over a year to figure out how to explain this; although, I'd say most of this has happened over the last 6mos or so. We just talk about it in little bits at a time, and it's mostly when he brings it up or has questions.