When my daughter was between 6 or 7 , she began to cry every time we would leave her grandmother ' s house. She would weep unconscionably. She would say over and over " I don't want to go. "
It took us weeks to find out that she was afraid that her grandmother was going to die. She had seen a movie where the elderly grandmother died , and she thought that because her grandmother was old ( in her 6 year old eyes) that her grandmother would soon die.
Fortunately, after much talking and consoling, we were able to help her understand that what happens in a movie is not meant to foreshadow what is going to happen in your life.
Thankfully, many years later, nana is still very much an active and engaged part of my daughter 's life.
I guess that kid's experience things in certain ways that they cannot always articulate. In our efforts to understand what was going on, we made several erroneous assumptions as to the cause of her problem..
We only had our first accurate insight into the cause of the problem when weeks later my 9 year old niece mentioned in passing how my daughter had cried throughout a movie that the 2 of them were watching.
I thought that as a family , we were very attentive to what the kids watched on the television. The movie was a benign family rated movie, and we had no reason to expect that kind of reaction.
I guess you do not always know what can be triggers for some kids . The 9 year old enjoyed the movie with no adverse reactions. The younger child experienced it very differently.