The Bond Between Parent and Child

I ran a nursery school for years, and one morning I ended up sitting with a three-year-old girl who had turned anxious out of nowhere. Her mother explained that the girl had cried for most of the previous night. Thinking she might be sick, the mother had taken her to a children's clinic. The staff looked her over, found nothing wrong, handed over some aspirin, and sent them home.

That same day the girl's father was due back from a trip he'd taken to look for work. Her mother got dressed in her best clothes and planned to collect the girl from school so the two of them could meet him at the airport. She packed juice and snacks to keep her daughter cheerful for the ride. The girl knew her father was arriving, yet the moment her mother set off toward the airport, she started crying again.

Eventually she settled, and I asked her to tell me about her dad. She couldn't. She was too upset to say much of anything clearly. The harder we tried to calm her, the louder she got, screaming and shouting until she started fighting with the other children. We couldn't let that continue, so one of the teachers took her aside to sit with her one on one.

Nothing worked. The snacks and juice did nothing. I tried phoning her mother and got no answer. I asked a supervisor to take her on one of the walks she usually enjoyed, and still the distress kept going. She was so wound up that none of us could manage her.

In the end I put on some quiet music and had her sit in my lap while I asked again about her father. That seemed to reach her, and she drifted off to sleep. It didn't last. She kept waking and asking for her dad, over and over.

I'd assumed her mother would have come back with the father by then to pick her up, but the hours stretched on and nobody came. After we closed for the night, I asked our shuttle driver to take her home to her family. When they got there, we finally learned why she had been inconsolable all day.

Her father had died before he could board his return flight. Severe meningitis. He was gone, and the news hadn't reached any of us. The girl had spent the entire day panicked and grieving over something no one around her knew about. It happened on exactly the day her father died, before he ever got on the plane.

She was the most distressed, hardest-to-comfort child I'd worked with, and the timing lined up precisely with his death. I don't have a tidy explanation. The connection between a parent and a child is unlike most others, and after that day I can't rule out some kind of link between them that runs deeper than what we can see.

Something strange happened that day.