Une of the main difficulties of parenting as it is experienced today is having to produce stories that transcribe, in a way that is more or less acceptable for children, the litany of catastrophes that seem to follow one another at a sustained pace. . To each of them, more or less always comes the same question: what attitude to adopt with the youngest? In the media, articles titled “Should we talk to children about…? (add the disaster of your choice; at random, the latest IPCC report) have moreover become the new chestnut trees of cataclysmic times.
In this regard, hiding in the sand, putting the problems into perspective as much as possible, or even choosing not to talk about them at all is by far the worst option. Often with a smartphone or tablet in hand, one ear hanging out on France Info, one eye squinting at BFM-TV, the child can hardly escape the flow of news circulating through multiple channels and the questions they raise. Either way, her boyfriends and girlfriends will tell her about the latest breaking news at school ; and his Astrapi will lay out a thematic file on the subject a few weeks later. So: dialogue remains the wisest option.
The didactic power of breadcrumbs
Two years ago, we already had to do a pedagogical assault to explain what the Covid-19 was. The first difficulty is that the adult, supposed to embody limitless knowledge, is often himself completely dropped. To the simple question “what is a virus?” », it is necessary for him, in the majority of the cases, to darken on the sly on Wikipedia in order to then be able to strike in a learned tone: “A virus is an infectious agent requiring a host, often a cell, whose constituents and metabolism trigger replication. » Then, his child raising an eyebrow in a sign of incomprehension, the adult will have to undertake to translate this jargon as best he can, using why not mental images, diagrams, or even the didactic power of a crumb of bread, into a kind of domestic remake of the show “It’s not rocket science”.
No sooner did you think you had gotten out of the thorny question of the Omicron variant than a new horrifying news sequence suddenly appeared.
While you imagined you got away with it, children always end up asking the questions that annoy them, or at least those to which we have no answer. “Dad, where did the virus come from? – Uh, listen son, it’s quite complicated. We first thought it was the fault of the pangolin, an animal with scales that we eat in China. This mammal could have been the intermediate host of the virus, and facilitate the passage from bats to humans… A bit like a bridge, you see? This is called zoonosis. The virus could also be produced in the laboratory, by manipulation. And then escape. But, at the start of the pandemic, this hypothesis was likened to a conspiracy theory… — Dad, what is a conspiracy theory? “Uh, don’t you want to look rather My Hero Academia ? »
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