Kids Can Get Through Anything That Can Be Talked About
You’re pushing a cart through the grocery store with your 6-year-old child or grandchild when a person with a visible disability rolls by in a wheelchair. Your stomach tightens. Anticipating the child’s wide-eyed reaction, you go into distraction mode – studying the variety of spaghetti sauce on the shelf and asking the little one to help you choose.
You hope the wheelchair went by unnoticed – and comfort yourself that if there are no awkward questions in the next few minutes, it will all be forgotten by the time you get home.
This scene points to one of the most useful ideas in child development: Children can get through anything that can be talked about.
It sounds simple, but for many parents and caregivers, it’s anything but standard operating procedure.
Two things are happening at once
When such uncomfortable moments arise, two separate things are going on, and parents often confuse them.
One is what’s happening in the adult’s mind: years of being taught not to stare, not to comment, not to make things awkward.
The other is what’s happening in the child’s mind: simple curiosity. Young children aren’t operating from a place of judgment. They’re trying to sort the world into categories, and a question like “What’s wrong with that person in a wheelchair?” is no different, developmentally, than asking why the sky is blue.
The discomfort almost always belongs to the parent – especially while standing in the middle of a crowded store. That’s when a simple, honest response is useful – something that respects both the child’s curiosity and the stranger’s privacy, without shutting the door on the conversation:
“Some people just need wheelchairs to move. Why is a longer conversation; let’s get through our shopping list now, and we can talk about it in the car.”
The harder conversations follow the same rule
The notion that talking is better than avoiding the conversation also applies to big topics that hit closer to home, like why you’re getting divorced, or what it means that a loved one has cancer.
When the issues are big and personal, kids already know something is wrong, notes Dr. Kimberly Bell, Chief of Clinical Practice, Training and Innovation at Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development; and host of the Hidden Language of Children podcast.
“They always know. So just start with that. If you’re sick, they know. If your family life is not going well, they know. If something’s wrong with Grandma, they know. They may not be able to tell you what it is they know, but they know something’s not right,” Bell says.
Left without an explanation, young children don’t stay blissfully unaware. They fill the silence with their own theory – something that is probably worse than the truth, and which almost always centers on themselves. “The divorce is my fault” is a classic example, because young children are egocentric by nature – everything feels like it’s about them.
“It is the things that we can’t talk about that persist as trauma,” Bell says.
It’s hard to talk with a young child about your divorce because it may make you feel like the divorce is some kind of failure or weakness on your part.
“The other reason we don’t like talking to kids about something like divorce is because we don’t want to have to answer the questions that are coming,” Bell adds. “Is it my fault?… Do you hate him now? Do you hate her now?… Who am I going to live with? These are things that make us feel sad, and so we think that if we don’t talk about them, the sad feelings will go away. And that’s not true.”
What young children learn from silence
When a big, obvious question goes begging, a young child may conclude that the topic is taboo –asking about it isn’t allowed, wondering about it isn’t normal, and the only option is to process it alone. That’s the real cost of avoidance: not that the child escapes pain, but that they process it alone, with the wrong information.
Another conversation that maxes out the difficulty scale is when you’ve been diagnosed with a serious illness, like cancer. You’re reckoning with all of your own worries and facing months of difficult treatment that will make you look and feel sick. It’s impossible to make that invisible. So you begin what will be an ongoing conversation about it, and the child asks, “Are you going to die?”
Bell’s suggestion doesn’t come with a coating of sugar. She would say something like, “That is a really, really scary thought, and what I can tell you is that mom and the doctors are going to do everything we can to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”
It’s honest. It doesn’t overpromise. And it doesn’t pretend the fear isn’t real. But Bell acknowledges that the parent needs to be well regulated when saying it. She recommends taking a few days to get there or to work with a therapist to find the words – but not so long that the child is left to fill in the blanks alone.
If the conversation does bring tears, that’s not a failure of composure — it’s a lesson. Kids need to see that big feelings have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that grown-ups can feel them and still manage them.
When you don’t have the answer, ask a better question
One of the most practical tools for a stumped parent is to turn the question back around: “Well, what do you think?”
The answer often surfaces a misunderstanding that’s more frightening than reality, and gives you something specific to gently set straight.
It’s not only hard news that trips up families. Even happy changes — a new sibling, a new house — can land unexpectedly, since a child’s first thought when hearing “you’re going to be a big brother” is sometimes “you’re replacing me.” The helpful response is the same: Don’t correct the feeling or try to distract from it. Instead, validate it and keep talking until you can discover and address the real question underneath.
None of this requires scripts memorized word for word. It requires a willingness to let the conversation happen instead of steering around it — trusting kids with the truth, sized to what they can handle.
