One of the main difficulties of parenthood as it lives today is to have to produce stories that reterscribe, in a nearly acceptable way for children, the litany of disasters who seem to be on A sustained pace. To each of them, always returns more or less the same question: what attitude adopt with the youngest? In the media, titrated items “Should we talk to children of …?” (Add the disaster of your choice; at random, the last IPCC report) have become the new chestnut trees of cataclysmic times.
In the field, make the ostrich, relativize the problems, or even to choose not to talk about it at all, from afar the worst option. Often with a smartphone or tablet by hand, an ear trailing on France Info, a ladywriting eye to BFM-TV, the child can hardly escape the flows of news that circulate by multiple channels and the questions they create. Anyway, his friends and girlfriends will talk to him about the latest Breaking News at school; And his astrapi lay a thematic file on the subject a few weeks later. So: the dialogue remains the wisest options.
The didactic power of bread crummy
Two years ago, we already had to storm pedagogy to explain what COVID-19 was. The first difficulty is that the adult, supposed to embody a limitless knowledge, is often herself completely dropped. At the simple question “What is a virus?”, He needs, in the majority of cases, darken on Wikipedia to then be able to assemble DOCTE: “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 misunderstanding, the adult will have to undertake to translate this jargon as it can, using why not images Mental, schemes, or the didactic power of bread crumbs, in a kind of domestic remake of the show “It’s not wizard”.
While you imagined being drawn to it, the children always end up asking the questions who are angry, or in any case the ones we do not have an answer. “Daddy, from where he comes the virus? – Uh, listening to Fiston, it’s pretty 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 of bat to the man … a bit like a bridge, you see? This is called zoonosis. The virus was able to Also be produced in the laboratory, by manipulation. And then escape. But, at the beginning of the pandemic, this hypothesis was assimilated to a theory of plot … – Dad, what is a theory of plot? – Uh, you do not Do not want to look rather my Hero Academia? “
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