My husband and I realized we were going to need some guidance when we found out we’d be returning to Detroit for surgery. The recovery may be long and difficult and there may be more surgeries in the future. How do you tell a four-year-old child what’s going to happen? How do you prepare her? What do you tell and what don’t you mention? We really didn’t know.
Fortunately, we have Mrs. Chocolate. Did I mention my daughter’s play therapist (that she LOVES) has many of her students and children call her Mrs. Chocolate? She picked the name because she loves chocolate. We introduced her to my daughter as Dhruti (her first name) and my daughter likes calling her by that name so she’s Dhruti to us.
I called Dhruti from Detroit last week and told her the news. She said she could meet with us when we got back and she could help us talk to our daughter in a way she would understand. We did meet with her and that one hour meeting gave me some peace and understanding because I now know more about how a young child handles and processes information. We have a plan and we feel much better about how to talk to her. Here’s what she told us:
She said my daughter doesn’t have a concept of what it means to have surgery. Even though she knows dad had hernia surgery recently, it’s an abstract concept to her. Her level of understand is that dad went to a hospital because something was wrong with him and he saw a doctor. The doctor fixed him. That’s what surgery looks like to her.
Talking about procedural aspects of what she will be going through are all she needs to know. Saying, “you’re going to the hospital and your doctor will do surgery on your eye. He’ll do what doctor’s do to make your eye better” That’s it. That’s all she needs to know.
Don’t tell her more than two days before about anything that’s happening. We didn’t tell her (or prepare her) for the IV infusions of steroids she had for the last three days in preparation for the surgery. We just told her right before that we were going to the hospital to get an infusion. She was okay with knowing just before.
She’s going to begin to try and make the abstract concepts we tell her (surgery, eye patch, recovery, long trip, hospital, etc.) and try and make them concrete. The process of doing that will be very anxiety provoking for her. We want less anxiety for her so she’s on a need to know basis for now.
We’re not preparing her for afterwards or explaining too much. We want her to ask questions but if she’s too busy processing all we’ve told her she won’t be able to ask questions. We need those questions because they will be the biggest indicator of how she’s handling the situation.
Dhruti had said something about a month ago that I wrote down and have been thinking about ever since. She said, “Stress is not an emotion and shouldn’t be in the vocabulary of a four-year-old. Worry is an emotion. Stress is a psychological manifestation of worry.” We’re going to try and keep her worry level low and prevent as much stress as we can.
Dhruti also gave us some other information we found very useful. We talked about having her use the iPad because she can pull it very close and watch shows, movies and play games. We were worried about “screen time” but it seems to be helpful to her.
What she told us was that at her age, she’s still developing at the brain stem level which is processing sensory input. That development continues until about age five. For her, screen time has a positive impact on her instead of a negative one because of the visual deficiency. It’s a technological numbing agent for her other senses. Because she’s lost the majority of her sight, all her other senses are in a heightened state right now. She needs a chance for those senses to be able to relax and “go offline” and watching a show is helpful as her brain copes.
She told us sighted people see first then the brain processes afterwards. Typically you see, then think about it and then experience the thing. Non-sighted children experience things first. She’s going through a revolution in how she experiences the world and it may well be exhausting to her. So we’re giving her the iPad whenever she wants it. She doesn’t ask for it a lot, and when she does, she watches pretty good educational children’s shows. She tells us about what she learns afterwards.
The Big Boy Update: We drove by a strip mall a few days ago. In front of one of the stores was a large, artificial Christmas tree. My son said, “look at that giant tree. Everybody in North America comes to that tree.” (We can thank our Montessori school for his knowledge about North America.)
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter was filling in a coloring page the other day and had selected the green marker after dabbling with some of the other colors. Saw was vigorously coloring in green when my husband looked over and said, “don’t use all green.” She didn’t bother to look up as she replied, “but that’s just how it goes.” A few minutes later she lifted up the picture and said, “taadaa, he’s all green!”
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