Helping a kid through a minor injury
Today's question is one I didn't even know I had, until I read The Parking Lot Rules, a book by Tom Sturges, a California dad who coaches and mentors kids. The question is, what do you do when your kid is crying and in distress over what you think is a minor injury, especially in public? How do you help without making it too big a deal?
Here's his answer, the subject of today's Monday Consult: It's called "taking the pain away."
He describes a birthday party in which the birthday boy was hit by a swinging pinata stick. (Ah, pinatas. A subject for another day.) Sturges had the idea to help by getting all the kids to "take away" the boy's pain by taking it on themselves. He urged them all to lay hands on the boy's injured arm, and on the count of three, he said the "pain" would be shared among everyone. All the kids went along with this and began grabbing their arms. The birthday boy was so distracted and amused by this that he seemed to feel better.
"By taking a few minutes to take the pain away, we gave Cole a chance to be respected for his pain, to recover from his injury, to be the absolute center of attention for a little while, and to have everyone at the party care very much that he felt better," writes Sturges.
It's an interesting idea. Do you have other techniques that work?
Comments
That "laying on hands" treatment there sounds suspiciously like evangelical prayer healing... besides, having two dozen grubby, cake and dirt covered kids at a party touching your fresh wounds doesn't exactly sound hygienic ! :)
I have boys, they get into situations often where they get hurt (minor), and I have a couple techniques I've used, some of which are even backed by scientific theory!
Note that for serious injuries, get a doctor or get some real first-aid.
1. For anything that doesn't bleed - rub the surrounding area. Remember getting a bump on head, how you instinctively want to rub the bump to make it feel better ? This actually works by interfering with the signals the nervous system sends from the point of the injury. Adding the extra "noise" by stimulating the area surrounding the injury can reduce the overall pain signal. For these types of injuries, I'll rub their head while I explain how it works (nothing distracts mine better than a good medical discussion, future doctors perhaps?)
2. Blood - scratches. These don't really bleed out, but they should be kept clean and not rubbed. Brush the dirt off. I usually tell mine a story about any one of hundreds of scratches I've had... the "war story" of my days as a kid usually distracts from the immediate injury long enough for them to remember that it doesn't really hurt that bad. Get a cool cloth to wash it and/or some anesthetic/antibiotic on it.
3. Blood, the red stuff. Stopping the bleeding is a priority, once you get a hand on that, I always tell them, not matter how bad it's REALLY bleeding, that "it isn't bleeding too bad." Follow with the usual "one time when I was a kid" story, and hopefully you've kept their attention off the wound long enough to wipe it and stop the flow.
In general, I think we are pretty lucky... my boys are what my wife calls "resilient" when it comes to injury. They will get a bloody nose, and I have to tell them to quit playing long enough to fix it up.
From day one, our rule has been to NEVER, I mean NEVER react scared or frantic when they get injured. They take their cue from you. My niece gets a minor bump and it's 5 minutes of crying... it's not that she's a girl, I think it's that her parents react too much. Once, at our house, one of the boys face-planted into the floor, the BIL and SIL both jumped up, yelled for my wife "Ben is hurt!!" - He was up and running again before she made it into the room from 20 feet away He just kind of looked at them like they were nuts :)
...don't over-react (seriously, don't do it), distract them, rub it to make it stop hurting where applicable, get them back to whatever they were doing asap.
Posted by: Dave T | June 8, 2009 5:40 PM