How to determine if a kids injury is serious or not
offer them “medicinal chocolate” if they stop crying it’s fine if they carry on crying/refuse the chocolate then it’s serious
From age two apparently^^
Oh wow I never heard this one.
German edition: offer the kid to blow away the pain. If it’s better afterwards it’s okay, if they refuse or still screaming it’s serious
Also a lot healthier than giving your kid chocolate everytime they cry tbh
It’s not everytime they cry it’s only if they get injured and you’re unsure if it’s serious because they are screaming but you can’t tell if they are overreacting or not
For things that are clearly a minor bump we give kisses instead
And before anyone thinks if a kid is screaming it’s not an over reaction
My kid fell off their bike and skinned their knee. Just skinned it that’s all and they went into full on scream/crying hysterical because it was bleeding and they hadn’t had an injury where they bled within their memory
It wasn’t so much the pain as the blood that made them hysterical.
In that case we could see it wasn’t serious but the chocolate helped them calm down and then I got them to tell me about Terraria until they were calm and their wound was dressed
It was absolutely an overreaction to a skinned knee but it was also an understandable one
Kids don’t have experience or pain tolerance we do and sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s something that requires a trip to the hospital or not
Kids don’t have experience or pain tolerance we do
This is important….we’ve had 20+ years of injuries and can compare some pain to other pains and be like this doesn’t hurt nearly as much as this other thing that happened. Pain is an experience that’s new to kids, especially little ones. Some overreactions are to be expected
There is a good chance that whatever just happened is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to them
This also applies to emotional pain.
They have not had the experiences that build emotional resilience yet, so it’s only normal that they will have a hard time with things we consider to be trivial. They may be trivial to us, but, as with physical pain “Whatever just happened is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to them”