My son is at a new school now, and much less anxious. Or so I believed, until second grade.
He awoke, crying out, in the middle of the night. One wake up. And then another. And another. Out of bed seven times. I soothed him, then placed a trash can next to his bed (at 2 a.m., isn’t it usually about vomit?). Finally, he slept — yet never got sick. What had kept him awake?
We discovered the answer early the next morning. In an email from the school sent after-hours that both my husband and I had somehow missed, we learned the school had participated in a fire safety drill.
Yes! Bring it on, I thought. My son was also terrified of fire, so a practical lesson on staying safe was important.
However, instead of a simple school evacuation drill, activity sheets or a lecture on not playing with matches (circa 1978) from the fire chief, the message said this:
Students [will] participate in a smoke-filled room simulation. For the simulation, students will go into a trailer that is filled with [fake] smoke. Students will learn how to crawl out of smoke. Please be sure to talk to your child tonight or tomorrow morning about this so they are not scared tomorrow!
A smoke-filled room simulation in elementary school.
Emergency simulations are for EMTs, SWAT teams and teachers — not for 6- and 7-year-olds who should focus on being kind, standing up to bullies and playing four square at recess. Instead, my child now had nightmares.
Some schools are taking it even further. In Florida, an entire high school was sent into a panic after intentionally not telling students in advance that they were conducting an active shooter drill. And recently, a Colorado school made the decision that not only should schools prepare students to run from a shooter, but also prepare them to fight back ― as if our children, not adults, should be responsible for acting the hero instead of protecting themselves.
Our schools are serving up a heaping platter of anxiety to our children. When do we allow them to be children? Between too much homework, too much technology and not enough recess, our kids are already overwhelmed. Do we need to add bad men, fake smoke and combat tactics?
Emergency preparedness in school is nothing new. Hordes of baby boomers came out of the ’50s emotionally scarred from Bert the Turtle bomb safety videos and “duck and cover” drills (as if ducking under a 2-foot-tall desk would have protected one from an atomic bomb). My mother remembers the drills — and the fear — to this day.
“Tell me, Mom, did you ever need to actually duck and cover, due to real atomic bombs, in your childhood?” I asked her, shortly after my little guy’s frightful incident.
“Um, no,” she replied.
“Did you find these drills useful at any point in your entire life?”
“Um, no.”
Luckily, by the time I was a kid, grown-ups had more common sense. In the golden 1970s, safety drills were not on the list of things that kept us up at night. Don’t get me wrong ― I had plenty of tornado drills as a kid in the Midwest. These consisted of squatting and giggling in the hallway, away from windows, until we heard the all-clear bell. Easy peasy — and not particularly scary.
I agree with the need to teach our kids how to stay as safe as possible in dangerous situations — particularly in light of the very real tragedies we’ve seen in recent years, and in light of ongoing and serious threats toward certain communities. But there are many ways to keep it kid-friendly, just as we do when we are teaching them other basic life skills.
When I teach my toddler to not walk into the street, I don’t show him graphic visuals of mangled limbs, or drive a pretend car at him so he can leap out of the way. I simply say, “Cars are dangerous, and if you cross the street without a grown-up, you might get hurt.” We practice crossing while holding hands and looking both ways. There is no need to warn our smallest children about crushed body parts — or about bad men coming into schools.
Credit: Source link