bad boys kill him?” he sobbed. He cried for a solid five minutes as we consoled him. We were both unprepared
at how upset the ending had made him.
Obviously, this was another conversation that was overdue – the good guy doesn’t always win. It’s hard to
tell your child that there are bad people in the world and sometimes they overpower the good in those around
them. One needs only to look at the headlines of the past few months to know this truth.
So why are these conversations hard to have? Sometimes it’s the fear of hurting feelings or bringing up a
subject that we find uneasy about ourselves. But these experiences have led me to understand more often than
not the hardest conversations to have with our children are the ones that mark the end of a certain innocence
that we aren’t ready to see pass.
Most recently I have wrestled with another conversation with our 5-year-old that is long past due: “It’s time
for you to sleep all night in your own bed.” We never let his older siblings sleep with us, but as the baby, we
would occasionally allow him to slip into our bed in the middle of the night. As a toddler, it was sometimes
cramped, but he would snuggle up, put his arms around your neck and smile in his sleep. How could we resist?
Today, he takes up more bed space than I do, kicks the covers off each night and his cold feet usually end
up in my wife’s back. We agree that he needs to stay in his own bed, but because we have grown used to the
arrangement or because we are typically too tired to get up and lead him to bed, we have not had that final
conversation that is way past due. Or perhaps we both fear that this, too, will mark a passing of innocence that
we are not ready to see end.
It’s true – our kindergarten son still sleeps with an innocent smile in our bed. Judge me if you like, but at least
he no longer pees on presidential barns.
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