Our kids often do funny, weird, strange things that, while they’re amusing, we have to wonder where the heck they got the idea to do that from. Kids are mischievous and curious, and that makes them willing to try new things, usually without considering the consequences or caring what anyone thinks of them. It’s one of those traits us adults have to marvel at and envy just a bit.
One mother was left in tears, however, after learning where her daughter got the idea to do something she at first thought was pretty silly, however.
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As most parents would, Stacey Feeley snapped a pic of her 3-year-old when she thought the girl was doing something funny.
Stacey caught her daughter standing on the toilet at home, and as she said in a Facebook post, “I was going to send it to my husband to show what our mischievous little three-year-old was up to. However, the moment she told me what she was doing I broke down.”
“I said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you standing on the toilet?'”
It turns out, her child was practicing a lockdown drill for being stuck in a bathroom she had learned at her preschool. “‘Lockdown. You have to be really quiet,'” she said. “It just broke me down,” she told ABC News .
“At that moment all innocence of what I thought my three-year-old possessed was gone,” Stacey wrote in her post.
She told ABC that “It is just heartbreaking when you think that in today’s world, that’s what they have to walk through and that is what a normal, everyday drill is like now.”
It’s worth mentioning that kids have long had to do safety drills for things like fires and tornadoes, but there’s a big psychological difference between a disaster and a person actively stalking and hunting children in a school.
Stacey says she doesn’t think her daughter quite gets what the lockdown drills mean.
“In the schools they are very good about telling them that this is a drill for if someone that is not supposed to be in the building is there,” she told ABC. “They do not bring up guns whatsoever, but the older kids understand.”
Stacey’s Facebook post — shared more than 40,000 times — is a vent that came from a place of outrage over the world her daughter is growing up in.
But she also wanted her post to “wake people up.”
“Politicians — take a look,” she wrote. “This is your child, your children, your grandchildren, your great grand children and future generations to come. They will live their lives and grow up in this world based on your decisions. They are barely 3 and they will hide in bathroom stalls standing on top of toilet seats. I do not know what will be harder for them? Trying to remain quiet for an extended amount of time or trying to keep their balance without letting a foot slip below the stall door?”
Her post became a passionate plea for some kind of gun control measures.
“No one thinks gun control will be 100% crime control,” she wrote. “But maybe, just maybe, it helps 1% or 2% or 50%? Who knows unless we try? Why on earth are there not universal background checks? Where is a universal registration database? Why are high capacity magazines ever permitted to be sold to anyone other than direct to the military? Is that really necessary to protect yourself or hunt for that matter?”
She also called for some attention to be paid to mental health.
“Let’s talk mental health. Where is the $500 million that the Obama administration put into the budget for approval…did it go through? Is it being implemented or just sitting there? Where is the access to care for those struggling with mental illness? Politicians, I ask you…how can I help?”
Although she doesn’t claim to have any answers, she’s consistent about one thing: Wanting to help.
“Entrepreneurs, innovators, are you there? Can I help? Can I help you make a difference? I want to offer support. I cannot give you techie advice, expertise in healthcare, or financial backing, BUT maybe I can point you in the right direction? Maybe I know someone who knows someone who can help?
“I am not pretending to have all the answers or even a shred of them, but unless you want your children standing on top of a toilet, we need to do something!”
h/t ABC News
