Bad Times Stories

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/first-the-bad-news/?ref=opinion

The article Bad Times Stories is an op-ed piece written by Judith Warner from the New York Times paper. This op-ed piece is about her life as mother and her parenting skills. After tragic times such as 9/11, the Holocaust, and most recent the tragedy in America the death of a Wal-Mart employee on Black Friday due to aggressive shoppers are all topics her 8-year-old Emilie daughter has questions about. Warner is struggling about how she needs to approach these issues with her daughter because Emilie is traumatized by these events. She's scared and is always thinking about these horrible times inside of thinking about all the happy and positive times ahead of her. She wants her mother to share more of her knowledge about his topics but Warner can't do that because the truth of these events is too much for an eight-year-old to handle.

"It is the thing that runs through her mind as we drive in the car and she considers the landscape around her. ‘What does Wal-Mart look like?' she asked me on Wednesday, searching for clues in the storefronts of Northwest Washington.’ A great big store, with groceries and clothing and auto supplies, and electronics,' I said. 'So it’s like Best Buy,' she said, as we drove past Best Buy. 'Not quite like Best Buy. ''Is it near here? ''There’s no Wal-Mart near here,' I said. 'That store was on Long Island.' 'Oh!' she gave a great sigh of relief. 'That’s really far away.'""I would never have expected the Wal-Mart incident to lodge itself so deeply in Emilie’s mind." Warner tries to keep the world away from Emilie such as the paper with grotesque pictures or the news on television because she is so young. "This is why I fought getting cable TV for eight years. This is why I leave the newspapers folded up, photos down." Warner feels like this is the right solution, but she knows her plan of keeping these things from Emilie can easily be revealed in school to her.

My reaction to this article was initially “Wow” this young girl is her own worst enemy. She is in the middle of a stage of too young to get away with things but not old enough to know everything. It's hard to protect young children from these event that have happened in the United States but all parents have to face these issues because if they don't hear about it at home there going to hear it at school, and at school the parent can't help the child know right or wrong or just not to be scared. I think Warner is doing the right thing by hiding pictures from the paper because images like that could stay in her daughter mind forever. But I think Warner needs to step up and tell her daughter about these issues a little more in depth, because the real truth is, if the parent doesn't tell them someone else will.