Q: I was horrified when my 4-year-old daughter stared at my fellow bus passenger, then loudly asked me, “Why does that lady look so funny?” How could I have apologized to the woman?
A: You could have simply said, “I apologize for my daughter. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” Although you wouldn’t have wanted to scold your daughter in front of others, you might have told her it’s impolite to stare. Later, it would have been a good time to explain to her that staring and saying negative things about others hurts their feelings. By the time a child is 3 or 4, she should be able to grasp these basic principles of courtesy.
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When my grandson was about that age, I took him to an event at our local college (I was a nontraditional student there) He looked at a friend of mine who is in a wheelchair and has a normal sized head but a child sized body. He asked him…”Are you a puppet?” My friend did not skip a beat. He replied, “No Jonathon, I am a real person, just like you.” He apparently understood that Jonathan was still sorting out “real” from “make believe” and did not mean it as an insult. I will always be grateful for the way he handled it.
We should all be so gracious.
Once in the grocery store, a man with no legs was in front of us. My 4 yr old says quite loudly, why doesn’t that man have any legs. I was mortified, but when I looked to the man to apologize, he was smiling, so I told my son, I don’t know, why don’t you ask him. My son then said, How come you don’t have legs. The man told my son he was in a war and stepped on a land mine and they got blown up. My two year old at this point says—ooooo did it hurt? The man smiled and said, no I did not feel anything for a long time. My 4 yr old said, Oh and smiled at the man. I thanked him for his understanding. He thanked me for not making a big deal of it, he said he would rather answer a child’s question than have parents hushing and rushing their kids away, making the children feel they had done something bad. I think that man made a huge impact on my children’s ability to accept differences in other people, they saw that while he was different he was still a person and they accepted him. After wards, whenever they saw the man, they always said hello to him and asked how he was.
What a lovely story of human connections. And how beautifully it illustrates how those who have suffered such loss still have so much to contribute.