The World All Around: How We Can and Can’t Shield Kids From Violence

I recently wrote a post about letting our kids have their privacy and not sharing every blessed part of their lives on the internet. I stand by it. That said–I’m going to share this thing, because it is important. And not just about my kid.

Last week there was a terrible shooting in our neighborhood. In what is now (finally) being called a hate crime, a man in a local bar and grill shot two Indian natives, as well as another man who tried to stop it. One of the men has since died.

Needless to say, there was lots of activity in the ‘hood that night. Especially since the shooter lives just around the corner from our house. For several hours before they apprehended him (about 90 miles away), authorities thought he was on foot in the neighborhood. It was a long night of sirens and helicopters, and neighbors who live a little closer to the house could hear police trying to address him through the bullhorn. My husband was out of town that night. I don’t usually mind being home by myself after dark, but I’m not gonna lie… It was a little jarring this time.

But for the life of me, I thought the kids were asleep.

Yesterday, my Kindergartner brought home his February writing journal from school, and this was his entry from February 28:

“There was a mean guy. Who shot pepele. The house is next to mine i did not sleep it was so lowd.”

You know those parenting moments that get you in the gut? This was one of them. I told them very little about what was going on, but they heard about it at school the next day, so of course we had to talk about it. Which is fine, because I’m all about helping them process and not denying reality. Still, it made me realize how little I can shelter them from the violent world we live in.

In my book, (out next month) there is a whole chapter about this–how desensitized we’ve become to so much of our culture, and how intentional I am about trying to show my kids another way. I don’t let them watch violent shows on t.v., or play violent video games. We strongly discourage toy guns, and have been anti-spanking since recognizing that the first way to teach not hitting, is by not hitting. Heck, even our Sunday School lessons at church are designed to counter the glorified violence in which the Christian narrative is so complicit. (More on that in the book as well).

Which is to say, I have done everything in my power to keep violence out of my kids’ personal space–but eventually, it comes home to us. Try as we might, we can’t cover their eyes and ears forever.

You know what truly breaks my heart about the picture that he drew? You may not be able to see it, but there is a pair of mean looking yellow eyes… The literal monster under the bed. That took my breath away.

Still, I recognize that for kids all over the world–and even in my own city–the sirens, the gunshots, and the helicopters are a daily routine. I recognize the privilege of living out here in suburbia, where all is quiet, for the most part, until it’s not.

But the inevitability of violence reaching us, eventually, is no reason to stop my vigilance in keeping it out of their everyday life and space. I think that is so often the problem–we think “Oh, that’s just the world we live in,” and so we let them watch whatever, play whatever, until it is just the accepted norm. Let this serve, not as an acceptance of things we cannot change–but as a reminder that this should never be normalized. This kind of hatred and rage, the loss of human life, and the chaos that follows and bleeds into the world around, is not normal. It is not “just the way things are.” I will never accept that, and I hope you won’t either.

Even as our government and the NRA conspire to make guns even MORE available to the mentally unstable. They have clearly accepted a certain norm of violence that I, as a mother and a follower of Christ, never will. I will not let that be acceptable for the world my children grow up in, and I hope you won’t either.

In the meantime: we may not be able to shield our kids from this sort of event forever, but we can certainly affect how they process it. We can give them safe spaces to draw, or write, what is real–even if it is a monster under the bed that breaks our hearts wide open. And we can set their expectations to place of hope and change and commitment to a better way… That yes, these terrible things happen; but it is not inevitable. It might be the way of the world, but it is not our way. And it is not the world that God wants.

Lest you think that this kid is traumatized forever, let me show you what he wrote on the next page:

“I think the tooth fairy turns teeth into toothpast. For stors. For you. It looks really cool like a rambow!”

He will be ok. My goal in life is that he can always find such a “rambow,” after every storm.