Following the recent violence at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie, children may have fears or anxiety about their own safety. The National Association of School Psychologists has an excellent fact sheet about how to talk to children about such violence, and also how to protect them from those parts of the issue they are not yet mature enough to deal with.
CNN also has five tips for parentswho are struggling with how to explain the Colorado tragedy without scaring their children.
ELL Families: Here is a version of the NASP fact sheet that you can copy and paste into a translation program.
It is also helpful to remind children who have moved from a smaller country that America is a very big space. If you are in Boston, the Colorado shootings happened almost 2,000 miles away – slightly less than the distance from Seoul to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), and slightly more than Rome to Baghdad. Although this tragedy happened here in the US, for most children it fortunately did not happen in the area they consider “here.”
