Fears, Flights and Feeling Frustrated!

Jake is overly anxious about anything.  He has some OCD tendencies that make his fears worse, not least of all because he is unable to move quickly past them.  They prey on his mind for days, weeks or even months until they finally fade behind some new irrational fear.  Consequently we have to be very careful what we talk about in front of him.  Anything that involves death, or some kind of germ that's making the rounds is off the normal conversation menu.  We don't watch the news while he's around because we don't know what's coming up, and so can't discuss it with him before his imagination blows it out of proportion.

It's not that we keep him smothered in cotton wool.  We do talk to him about life.  He understands about social issues that are far beyond normal comprehension for an 8 year old because I want him to grow up being socially aware.  The difference here is that these issues all deal with life, and it's death - and anything that can cause it - that scares him.

So it was with horror that I heard the news about the flight crashing into the Atlantic en route between Brazil and France.  I've been flying transatlantic from a very young age and so I never had a fear of flying.  I know accidents happen, and that sometimes things go very wrong as with this flight, but I never worry about it happening to my plane when I'm flying.  I have some kind of serene acceptance that it could happen, but it probably won't and if it does I won't know anything about it anyway!  My son however does not appear to have inherited this serenity!

From some source or other he has found out about this plane crash and this is his new worry.  The plus side is that it has stopped him worrying about what will happen if he needs more surgery.  The negative side is that we fly to England next week! 

I have to admit that I wasn't prepared for this chat last night.  I was prepared to deal with the continuing saga of surgery possibilities so I was taken a little unawares.  Frustrating as it is to seemingly go in verbal circles every night, as least I have a script in my mind now so I know what calms him down.   It would be easy on many occasions when dealing with his fears to offer him worse solutions, but usually this isn't a tactic I use.  Last night I did, and fortunately he didn't see it as a problem.  He thought that it would be better to travel on the ground because it's safer, we don't hear of many car crashes on the news.  I said that's because there are too many of them to make exciting news headlines but planes didn't crash very often and so all the news programs wanted to cover them.  We then talked about how silly it was that planes demonstrated how to put on a life vest if the plane was to come down in water, when the flight was 100% inland.  Then I told him about the pilot who managed to "land" his plane on water in New York and not only did everyone survive, but some of the people have already had their belongings returned to them.  This cheered him up immensely and he went off to sleep quite happy.

That won't be the end of it of course.  Unless a new worry surfaces in the next few days, this will be our conversation pattern for the next week.  It's frustrating, but watching my 8 year old son sleep safely in his bed after our chat, I thought about the families of the parents who were lost on that flight.  Some of them were boys around Jake's age.   It does make you stop and wonder whether you are doing the right thing when taking your children places because bad stuff doesn't always happen to someone else.  On the other hand, is it really worse to let them try their wings than keep them in a cage - I'm pretty sure a bird would choose to take its chances in the sky than opt for the safety of a gilded prison.  We'll get through this fear just as we have countless others, and then I'll have to face the next one and hope it's able to be met with as much logic and statistics as this one was!