School Shooting Newtown CT

[IrishLake]

My daughter and I had the discussion last night. She turns 7 this week.

What I said "Baby, I don't want you to be afraid but I want to talk to you about something awful that happened today. An evil man walked into a school in another state, and he killed a lot of kids and teachers. They are angels now. It's important that you say a prayer for them and their moms and dads and brothers and sisters because they will be sad for a very long time. I wanted to talk to you about it first though, before you saw it on the news and got scared, or before you hear people talking about it at school. Don't be afraid of going to school. Your teacher will always protect you. But it is important that you always listen to her during an emergency. If there's a fire, a tornado, or a stranger in the school, you always listen to what she says and do what she asks very quickly."

Her first questions were; why would someone want to kill a lot of kids? (I don't know honey, he was a very ill person, his mind wasn't right). What were the kids names? (I don't know but if you want me to tell you when I find out, I will). Is the evil guy going to go to another school? (No, he is dead. He killed himself because he knew what he did was a horrible awful thing).

She got teary eyed and asked if she could snuggle in my bed for a while. I obliged. We talked about it a little more today, about how important it is to hide if something like this happened at her school.