Talking about tough topics with young children: Sometimes, it is not about giggles anymore.
- Frédérique and the Wooden Fellows
I often discuss light topics here, bringing from time to time Mme Rigolotte, to reflect on the joy of listening to young children, or engaging with them with all kind of playful activities to stimulate their mathematical thinking.
But the life of young children is not always peaceful, and they, too, may have to go through tough times. Maurice helped me write a post about grieving a few months ago, a topic close to my heart, but I recently found resources beyond grief from Sesame Workshop, that I thought I should elevate today.
As you may know, hurricane Helene has had some dramatic effects a couple of weeks ago, and I was looking for resources to talk about it with young children. Sesame Workshop offers handouts and tips to discuss emergency situations related to weather, but they also offer support on a variety of additional tough topics such as grief, divorce, incarceration, foster care, traumatic experiences (e.g., poverty, violence, etc.)
I hope you appreciate those resources, and the convenience of accessing a wide range of topics on one page. Indeed, one never knows when a child may raise a question that may make you feel helpless, or even uncomfortable, based on what the child may hear at school, see on the street or on TV, or face on their own.
Few things to highlight about those resources:
- The range of tough topics, that includes grief, divorce, but also homelessness, incarceration, parental addiction. Those topics are less common from picturebooks, often used to engage young children with various subjects in the home or in the classroom
- The embracement of multi cultures, and multi languages of the world we live in. For instance, one of the resources around grieving focuses on supporting native American children with grieving, through access to a webinar. The resources related to displacement and resettlement are available in several languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Ukrainian, etc.
- The variety of resources, including videos to watch with kids, but also webinars for adults, or print-out pages, ready to go for teachers, or families.
I hope you spend some time this week to check it out.
Let’s finish our post on a lighter note. Maurice found some evidence of the presence of Doudou-Tout-Doux while in Chicago. Stay tuned, our next Fellow is on her way to join the team.
As always, thank you for being here, and see you next week !
