To think dd was not silly to get upset

[Verycold]

They watched a documentary about the Titanic today. She is 10.3, year 6. She found it very upsetting and was told off by the teacher for being "silly". Aibu to think it is not silly for quite a young child to find this subject matter upsetting?

I did speak to another teacher at the school this morning and said could they not have sent an email to warn parents.

You have my complete sympathy in this situation. (And, reassuringly, most of the other posters')

your dd sounds a lovely empathetic girl. my older dd was very upset at learning about Anne Frank in year 6.

why wouldn't she be upset? who isn't about such things?

Is it possible she got upset, then dramatised it?

She was calling her silly for disrupting a serious lesson, not following instructions and insisting on leaving the room!

eofa1 - are you the TA who told my DS he was being silly and over dramatic when he had a PTSD episode in class last year? He tried to insist on leaving the room and when he couldn't the ensuing episode certainly caused disruption. Your comments and her attitude have a lot in common!

OP I feel for your DD, it sounds like her development of empathy has outstripped her capacity to process her emotions. I'm sure this will balance out in time, but i must be pretty tough for her right now.

I am an adult. If I get upset in public, at work for example, I take myself off for a couple of minutes to regain composure and then I can return. Being upset around others can be exposing and vulnerable.

Why is it that if a child tries to do the same they are labeled as being 'disruptive' and 'attention seeking'?

Also, sensitivity is determined by our DNA. There is actually a gene that has been discovered to dictate how sensitive an individual is. Calling such a person 'silly' is going to have a potentially very negative impact on them due to their likelg sensitive response. I wish more people were aware of this.

We get letters home asking permission from parents to watch DVDs etc. I think the problem here is not that your DD got upset over it (and rightly so because it was such a tragic waste of life) but how the unsympathetic teacher dealt with it. I would certainly speak to the teacher and the head teacher if you are still concerned.

Now you need to sit down and talk about what exactly frightened your DD. I would get a book about the titanic and sit down together and talk about it. How the law got changed afterwards to have more lifeboats etc. a still image in a book may not be a startling as a documentary. I hope it all gets worked out, op.

Eofa, I'm beginning to wonder if you might be the teacher in question...

It's not unlikely that the OP's dd was also embarrassed by her reaction, she was overcome with emotion and wanted to get away and was dealt with briskly and dismissively. The whole experience for her was distressing (whether you think it was justified or not, it is a fact which you cannot refute) and to have her intense feelings dismissed so insensitively in front of the class is not exactly going to make her feel any better. Whether she also suffered humiliation, further embarrassment, awkwardness, it is evident that OP's DD was having a strong emotional reaction and was not given any support by her teacher who showed a complete disregard for the pastoral care of one of her pupils.

The fact is, it was an extreme reaction but all the more reason for the teacher to deal with someone distressed, sensitively and not belittle her.
In my experience 10 year olds don't generally like to cry so readily in public and when they do, ie they can't control their emotions, it's a big thing for them. If those emotions are belittled in front of their peers, it's pretty inevitable that they will be feeling awkward/embarrassed/humiliated, any of these emotions, on top of distressed.

Not hyperbole, just a pretty likely by product in those particular circumstances.

"eofa1 - are you the TA who told my DS he was being silly and over dramatic when he had a PTSD episode in class last year? He tried to insist on leaving the room and when he couldn't the ensuing episode certainly caused disruption. Your comments and her attitude have a lot in common!"

Errrr, no, funnily enough I'm not. As I said before, if a child suffers from something like PTSD then the school would have had chance to plan learning activities around that, as the parent would surely have notified them of the situation.

Just wanted to say I am touched by the support! Hopefully she will sleep better tonight. We had another chat about the film and how to deal with the images when they pop into her head. She really isn't a drama queen.

eofa1 Sometimes you cannot warn though. Parents do not always know what will upset their children. Getting upset at a Titanic DVD is not necessarily a special need, just something that needs to be handled sensitively.

Any amount of one off problems could cause similar distress (a nasty argument with friends, bullying, illness). Teachers and TAs need to be ready to deal with such events sensitively and professionally.

If only it were as clean cut as x, y and z will trigger a PTSD response because of a b and c...if it was than our lives would have been a whole lot easier than they have been over the last few years.

Very often, no-one knows that a certain topic/discussion/film will be a problem until the problem is happening. The same is true with any strong emotional response to an unexpected stimulus.

Like others I find it interesting that as an adult, if I'm upset I can step out of a room and compose myself, yet a child is expected to 'suck it up' well enough to stay in a classroom full of people if a teacher says they can't leave.

I think that there is a point when it suddenly occurs to a child that the victims of tragedies such as Titanic were real people just like them. That they were someone's mum, dad, sister, brother, child.

Until then you can watch info about Titanic and not be affected. Once you have had that realisation then in the future you can also bemore stoic about it but that first time must be quite a shock.

I'm guessing that that was what happened to Op's daughter.

Like some other posters I think I know the documentary this might have been, where one of the stokers had his leg trapped by the watertight door. I'm very interested in history in general and the Titanic, and will seek out information about it, but I did find this particular docu-drama quite graphic and upsetting. Some of the images are still imprinted in my mind a year or so later.

I don't normally get upset by tv at all but certain scenes in dramas can really affect you - this one it reminded me of a scene in a costume drama I saw years ago where a character got their leg caught in a man trap while out poaching- I still get flashbacks of that sometimes too.

So if it was the docu drama I'm thinking of, she definitely WNBU to be upset- and it's really horrible to feel like that and not be able to leave the room or turn the tv off, even as an adult.

We had another chat about the film and how to deal with the images when they pop into her head.

They're actors.

Great. Glad that's all sorted out then.

I wonder how the school would have handled another child calling a child "silly". I know in my DC school they would be pulled up on it - name calling isn't allowed.

Yes. But actors playing events that really happened, which is why it upsets her so much

They weren't actors in the real Titanic Achy.

I get weepy sometimes when ACTORS depict real events it is called getting emotional verycold i hope your dd is ok now

slightly OT, but when my friends child was in Y6 and studying dinosaurs, they had a letter sent out asking if the kids could watch a snippet from Jurassic park! warning the parents, asking if any Dc would be very scared by it! some children did not watch it.

similarly, DDs secondary school are doing some stuff in PHSE about driving - drink driving etc - we have been warned that there will be some graphic content in the films and that the school hopes that all parents will allow their child to take part, but also that it may be particularly upsetting for some students and that staff and school counsellor will be available if necessary.

it seems these 2 cases are in stark contrast to the teacher in the OP who appears not to have considered the "what ifs" of this situation, a bit like failing to do a risk assessment really.

I keep thinking about this. So you wouldn't cry at Schindler's List cos it's acting???

With that argument you could abandon age restrictions altogether, after all it's all just actors

She asked to leave? I think that's a bit silly, frankly

really? So if you didn't like something that was happening around you & you left that environment, can we call YOU silly?

She left so she wouldn't get upset any more. I for one think that is exactly the right thing to do.

The point about being able to leave the room if you're upset at work isn't really relevant. At school, teachers aren't supposed to leave a child unsupervised, so can't have any child who feels like taking a minute wandering out.