6 year old wishes they were dead 😢

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Any advice for how to respond to statements like that? Doctors arranged for January and play therapy but in the meantime I’m not sure if I’m doing the right stuff. I tell her I’d be very sad if she was dead. More sad than anything else could make me. I love being her Mum and she’s clever and funny and kind and lovely. I tell her all the different people who love her and that I’m going to keep finding ways to help her until she feels better again and I won’t stop until she does. Does that sound like a sensible response?

Why is she sad? If she's having a really bad time then I would worry. But at this age they sometimes say things for effect and if you ignore it they stop saying it.
If you make a big thing of it in their head it becomes a bigger thing.

Suspected neurodiversity so hating school and finding life in general hard. It’s been building since Easter with anxiety. This week is the first time she’s started actually saying she wants to die though. She has been saying she wishes she didn’t exist before now though. Also saying she wishes she was a tiny baby again but wasn’t her, as long as she could still have me for her Mum. She thinks she’s going to be kidnapped and “hurt by a bad man”. Worries about someone breaking into the house etc.

A way of looking at it (that I read about) is she is saying she wants something to stop, but she can’t see how to do it. The powerlessness makes her resort to despair.
Once you know what she wants to stop, you can work on it together.

We had the worries about someone breaking in at 6 too, oddly enough. We talked about robbers being after jewels and big piles of cash and how they don't like to be caught so they don't come in houses where people are, but like to go break into the banks or the jewellery shops. But then the police will catch them and put them in jail when the alarms go off. We then looked at the hatton garden jewellery shop robbery and joked about how there's nothing in our house the robbers would want and also how could they get in? Look at these locks etc. Seemed to fix it anyway... I couldn't deny the existence of robbers but it helped to deflect it. Might be harder if she's aware of anyone personally being broken into.

We only had that very specific anxiety though, and one about ghosts for a while.I don't have much to offer on the other issues I'm afraid, although I couldn't see if you'd reached out to the school for support?

Is her dad in the picture?

Is she using the Internet?

I remember trying to climb out a window at 7 .. This was the 70’s . I am ND ..

I never felt right .

i don’t have answers .. My best guess what would have helped was I was over as I am .

If your suspecting ND it she overwhelmed with all the Christmas activities . Mh day week ?

Yes Dad very close to her and supportive but has even less idea of what to say to her than me. No internet usage at all.

Op I was 6 when I started feeling depressed. I told my mother and she told me I was silly. My father later told me off for upsetting her. When he was 6 my child started showing signs of depression too. This is what I did differently and what I wished my parents had done for me:

• listened to my dc, made time for him to tell me everything, even thoughts and feelings that were hard for me to hear.
• told him that I love him, but not that he was making me sad/ making me upset etc. I don’t want him to feel like he has to hide his feelings from me
• taked to him about times he felt joy or calm and tried to make that happen more
• made a ‘happy memory’ diary together each night, where we both wrote out three happy memories about the day. I would start with things like “I saw a lovely bit of sky” or “when we noticed a squirrel on the way to school.” And then I would encourage him to think about the positive feelings he had during the day. We did that for about a year until it didn’t feel necessary anymore

is your daughter in year 1? If so, I do think that can be a big transition year. My son has not expressed suicidal thoughts since that age (he’s 11 now) and is very calm, happy and close to me. We still talk a lot about feelings and emotions and how to hold onto the positive moments in the day. He has just managed the transition to secondary school brilliantly and I couldn’t be prouder of him!

good luck, and I hope some of these techniques are helpful for you too

(edited for typos)!

Aww OP this literally made me cry poor baby and poor you must be heartbreaking., hope you get some help for her to feel better soon x

This sounds like a good idea for that specific worry & I’ll def try it thanks.
Thanks to everyone else for the replies as well. It helps to talk about it. I’m feeling very lovely with it. I don’t want to speak to extended family because although they know she’s not ok they would be very worried if I explained the latest.

My son said this from about 4/5. He has complex additional needs that weren't as obvious then. It carried on until I moved him to a different school at 9. He had play therapy which helped then other forms of therapy after.
Kids can say these things for all sorts of reasons, so it's tricky to know why.

Definitely Xmas isn’t helping and she begs to not go to school most days but has been for nearly 3 months. I worry about letting her stay off in case that makes it harder for her to go back. School have been supportive but she struggles to be very specific about what she finds hard. We are having an extra week off for a holiday at Christmas though somewhere local ish that she loves and is familiar.

This is really helpful thank you! I can definitely try all of these things. I do always tell her we can talk about how she feels anytime she needs to and I’ll always try to help her. I let her sleep in my bed when she needs to etc. She is in year 2 and worries about moving to junior school next year. She also misses last year’s teacher although she does like her current teacher as well.

She might not even know - sensory overload- see if they can give her breaks from the classroom - just a quiet area to decompress a little .

Thanks, I will mention this. She does say it’s too noisy at school, especially at lunch time.

My son (8) has said similar, that he doesn't want to be here anymore. It's awful for a parent to hear. He can't tell me why he feels like that, I dont think he actually knows. He is autistic and I suspect that life is just exhausting for him, particularly at school learning lots of new social rules that don't come naturally to him, masking and maybe feeling like he doesn't fit in or is different somehow. All this is compounded by the fact that he doesn't understand how he feels. They're big emotions for little people that even adults would find hard to understand and articulate.

All I try to do is talk about his feelings to see if he can explain how he feels and then try to add in some positivity e.g reminding him of something to look forward to or reasons to be grateful. I don't talk to my son about how it makes me feel as he doesn't need the added weight of my emotions when he has so much of his own going on.

My now 9 year old has and has had moments like thus. And the climbing out the window bit.

Things that have helped.

A poster of all her good qualities.

Role playing her day at school using cuddly toys. Can be quite funny picking who is who and really helps demonstrate situations they found hard and modeling what they could try next time.

Letting her have an occasional day off when she is overwhelmed.

Telling her if there was ever anything we couldn't sort out at school that we could always move schools.

Talking to teacher with her present about reluctance to attend.

Letting her be babied.sometimes ie. Coming into my bed,.Reading younger books/looking at TV shows she liked when younger.

Thanks, I am more and more thinking she is neurodiverse, as are other family members. Hopefully we’ll get somewhere with that in the New Year although I know a diagnosis isn’t a magic solution.

There was a similar thread on here recently when many posters said this can be OCD - my DD now 21 has severe OCD and it can start at 6 sadly. It can also be triggered by an autoimmune reaction (condition called PANS/PANDAS) - you can try Young Minds parents' helpline, or look at websites like this one to see if anything rings a bell:

https://nipinthebud.org/films-parents-category/ocd/

"Nip in the Bud" is a resource for parents of very young children who may have OCD, more appropriate than some of the teen/adult OCD charity websites but endorsed by OCD Action.

https://www.youngminds.org.uk/parent/parents-helpline/

Has she been exposed to those words?

She often asks me if I love her and will I be sad when she dies. She tells me she loves me dozens of times a day. We had a 20 year old family member die this Summer in an awful accident so that hasn’t helped things.
Maybe I should not say I’d be sad if she died unless she specifically asks that? I definitely don’t want her worrying about my feelings. I do tell her that I almost definitely won’t be here when she dies when she’s an old lady. Then she just gets upset about me dying.
I always feel like I’m saying the wrong thing because nothing seems to help.

How's she coping at school? My son by age 7 was completely overwhelmed and I eventually called time and took him out. He had a diagnosis of autism and was just not fitting in. This was just as Covid hit and the school closed so it was a huge relief for us all and he never went back. I found a specialist provision 18 months on.. best thing I ever did. It was so upsetting seeing him so sad, now a teenager and doing amazing. I know it's hard admins you feel a helpless as a parent but keep doing what your doing, tell her how much she is loved and how amazing she is 🤗

You don’t find it’s even worse for her going back after a day off then? I often want her to keep her at home and don’t, unless she’s ill of course.

Brilliant thank you. I have wondered about PANS/PANDAS. I’ll have a look at those links.