Matters of a sensitive nature

My daughter Nicki is an incredibly sensitive little girl. I only truly realized this when we started letting her watch TV not long after her second birthday. At first all we allowed her to watch was Sesame Street and then gradually introduced such things as Dora The Explorer and Curious George. She is limited to only 30 minutes a day which I think is more than enough for a kid her age. But some days I want to just cut out TV altogether because she has been frightened multiple times by things she has seen on the screen...

Who would have ever thought that something as wholesome as Sesame Street could cause a preschooler to burst into tears? Well it has quite a few times and even as recently as last week. The latest occurrence was during the opening segment when Oscar the Grouch was hosting a game show called "What happens next?" meant to teach kids about simple scientific concepts. It started off innocently enough with Slimy the Worm diving off a diving board into a pool of mud. Elmo needed to guess if he would make a big splash or a little splash and hypothesized that since Slimy is small he would surely make a small splash. He was of course right. Next Slimy climbed up a tall ladder and was to jump into the same pool of mud from much higher up. Alan explained to Elmo how because Slimy was higher up he would be going faster when he landed in the mud and would therefore make a big splash this time around. Slimy did indeed make a huge splash and got mud all over Alan in the process. This caused Alan to yell out "Oscar!" in an angry voice which made Nicki cry and hide her face in my arm. Oscar continued on with a few more "experiments" each one resulting in some sort of mess that made someone angry and in turn made Nicki cry.

There was another instance this past month when we took Nicki to the movies to see Horton Hears a Who. During one of the previews for Ice Age, a scary dinosaur appeared on screen roared loudly and showed his teeth. Nicki immediately started to cry and cling to me for dear life. I was amazed that in this theater filled with kids, some older, some younger, not one other child cried. Nicki was the only one who seemed to be affected by it at all.

Though most of her sensitivity has been evidenced by her reactions to things seen on screen, it has not only been limited to that. At her preschool earlier this year they sang a song called "There Was an Old Woman". The first verse of the song goes:

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly,
Perhaps she'll die.

The song goes on to have the woman eat bigger and bigger creatures so that they will catch the smaller creatures, until at the end she finally eats a horse and they say "She's dead, of course!"

Now I won't even go into my personal opinion of how inappropriate this type of song is to sing to a class of 3 and 4 year olds, but the truth is that all the other kids in her class were laughing and thought the song was hilarious. Nicki burst into tears and had to be taken out of the room so that she could calm down. (Side note: I have been assured that the song will no longer be sung in class.) It's interesting to me how deeply affected she was by the lyrics while the other children seemed unfazed.

What is it that makes her so sensitive to things like this? Have I kept her too sheltered so far in her short life? Should she have already been exposed (and possibly desensitized?) to the harsher realities of life? To be honest, all her reactions make me want to do is keep her sheltered even more, keep her innocent as long as possible and let her live a worry free childhood. Or is it possible that she is more in tune than other kids to these types of sensitive matters, which makes topics like anger and death affect her more? Does that mean I actually need to be more careful with what she is exposed to and not less?

I feel like all I can do is be there to hold her and comfort her when she gets scared and try to explain to her in words she can understand what all of these frightening things mean. There are so many things in her life that she is going to need me to explain and walk her through as time goes on. I hope that I can somehow help her to learn what life is all about without putting negative thoughts in her head and yet also without giving her a false illusion and naiveté about it all...