Emotions are confusing

Last night I had great plans to put the kids to bed and sit down to write for a good couple hours. Of course it didn't happen that way. It took E forty minutes to get to sleep (I'm not even going to go there again), and when J went to bed he started asking questions about tornadoes. Yes, tornadoes. I'm not sure when the last tornado was in Ontario, but he was very concerned that we didn't have a storm cellar in our backyard.

I told him the little I know about these storms, and tucked him in. He seemed fine, although he was thinking hard about things. Five minutes later I heard him crying in his room and went back up. He asked me if tornadoes kill people, and I said very rarely because in the places where they happen a lot, people know how to be safe. He didn't believe me  and started thinking about the worst-case scenario.

To make a long story short, he'd read a book about tornadoes at school (not sure how I feel about that book in a Kindergarten classroom) and thought that we would have a tornado at our house. It took almost two hours to reach him, because he was so upset. I tried explaining how they work,  that this is not an area prone to tornadoes and if there ever was one, of course Daddy would wake up to get to a safe spot.

All of this only made him feel marginally better, so at 9 pm I shifted my focus to other things. I told him that instead of worrying about something bad happening to us, why don't we think of other people who have had bad things happen and what we can do to help them. It took him a while to warm up to the idea, but he liked the thought of sending a card with his allowance in it for a child to get a new toy.

Then we graduated to some of the nice things he's done for people before, like donating his own toys to kids who don't have much money or playing with the autistic boy in his class because he doesn't have a lot of friends. I told him those nice things are still going, because he made one person happy whose going to make another happy and so on. I told him that the kindness he started three years ago is still going somewhere, and we will never know where it goes to or when it stops. He went to bed in a great mood, at almost 10 pm.

Now, I'm not sure how common this is for kids of his age but I'm guessing not very. Most kids are able to get over things quickly by thinking about something else. J just dwells. He gets caught on one thought and takes it to the very bitter end. It's a lot of effort to turn his thinking around, but I hope that by explaining these things to him now he can help to change his pattern too. With some direction and effort (okay, a lot), maybe when he's older he will naturally think of the best-case scenario rather than the worst. I know the mind can be trained to think differently, and I'm willing to put in the effort so he's happier all around.

These are the mental tricks that adults use too. When we're having a bad day, most times we can take a couple seconds to breathe and redefine our thinking. It's uncommon for a six-year old to need these techniques, but whatever works for him is what I'll help him to do. Best case scenario: by the time he's a teenager he will be a logical thinker and hormones won't have anything on him. Is that wishful thinking?