CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Imagine the following: It's been a really, really bad day; you've come home after losing your job. It's also a sweltering hot summer day, and you and your child hear the ice cream truck down the block.  Understandably, your child is ecstatic, otherwise, the experience for you is average and largely unremarkable given the circumstances.  Regardless, you take your child to the truck to buy them an ice cream.  After they deliberate for what seems like forever, they finally choose their favourite flavour ultimately for it to plop to the ground not moments after the truck departs. Again, understandably your child is devastated. While the ice cream tragedy fails to move the needle on your list of true atrocities, your child feels differently. 

Sometimes, as adults we forget that because many of the things that happen in children's lives lack real world implications, that the feelings they experience when something bad happens matches the true severity of the event. Despite the lack of implications on the child's life, in reality, the ice cream tragedy may evoke feelings of anger, despair, and sadness, in a similar way that the loss of a job may feel to an adult. Similarly, a teenager going through a difficult breakup, getting cut from a team, or even receiving a bad grade in school, can feel equally devastating the way adults do when bad things happen. These experiences are new, sometimes frightening, and can truly shape the narrative of children's self-worth, beliefs about the world, or themselves. So, while lost desserts may seem trivial to the complexity and nuances of our daily lives, sometimes kids feel differently.