By Shannon Williams
Children are one of God’s greatest gifts to us all, but just think about what it has been like to be a child in the past 11 months. Just watching the news about what has gone on in our own country during this time would be so scary seen through the eyes of a child or even a young adult. Our various social media platforms and accounts often make me very afraid for the good old USA, how would a 12-year-old cope with it all? How would they know who is telling the truth? We hear so much about “fake news” but, as an adult at least we have some critical thinking skills that allow us to make decisions about it all. But our children are just learning how to become critical thinkers and what an awful example we are setting for them these days with our news broadcast and social media accounts, and by some of our behavior.

My dad was in Vietnam while I was in the 3rd grade, my mother would often not allow us to watch the TV news. Trying to understand why so many people did not support why your father was absent in your life, and putting himself at risk, was just too much to deal with for a child, and my mother had the sense to shield us as much as she could. It is impossible to shield today’s children, they have information in the palm of their hands and often the information or news is nowhere near to the truth. If we wanted information, we always had our encyclopedias, it never dawned on us that they were out of date at any time or not telling the truth. We counted on adults, and at that time TV, to always tell us the truth. But our information super highway provides so much data, it is not a choice of trying to find out the information, but trying to find which information is correct, true or even something we can “sort of” believe in.

My husband’s great nephew (Jax) is 12 years old and recently his mother posted on her social media account a poem that Jax had written about how he is feeling these days. The poem expresses some very deep feelings for such a young man, I just had to talk to him about the poem and the experience of writing and sharing it. The poem was a class assignment which he had to read aloud to the class. He explained to me that it is about being sad and about his thoughts when things get tough, but he also told me how much it helped him to write about those feelings. He told me about sharing it with his class and how it made him feel so good about himself and his writing. You could hear the pride in his voice, when he talked about what he could create by writing. He got a lot of positive feedback from his classmates and we all know how good that feels.

I keep thinking of how hard things are now for our children, how they don’t have the many supports they count on, like seeing your friends every day. Going to the mall to hang out, having friends over to spend the night, not to mention being able to have lots of family and friends near to celebrate all of life events. As much as they might have protested about it, you know spending time with grandparents filled them with love, but now the worry over “giving them COVID” is something they have to deal with. That is just too much for our children. Let us all try to remember all the fears and feelings we had as a child and make sure those children and young adults in our life can count on us during this hard time. I got Jax permission to share his poem with you all.

[Feb-1-2021]