A Spoonful of Context Helps The Medicine Go Down

I teach kindergarten, and this happened about a year ago. One Monday, a student of mine, a very sweet girl, gifted me a picture she had painted during the weekend.

Girl: “I was going to make one for [Teacher Assistant], but Aunt [Name] said I couldn’t because we had to go get her drugs.”

Me: “You said she had to get drugs?”

Girl: “Yes. I didn’t want to go, but she said she ran out and needed to get more.”

Me: “Where did she take you?”

Girl: “It was a long way away outside, and it was hot. We met a strange man, but Aunt [Name] said he was nice, not scary.”

Me: “Then what happened?”

Girl: “Nothing, it was boring, and I got tired. But Aunt [Name] gave me ice cream after for being good and not calling mom to tell her.”

This was a declaration that required following up on. After a longer conversation with [Girl] and her parents, this is what I understood happened.

[Girl] had stayed with her aunt on Saturday so her parents could have a date night. During that time, [Aunt] realized she had run out of a medication and had taken [Girl] with her on a fifteen-minute walk to her local pharmacy to pick up her prescription for the night.

Along the way, they walked past a unkempt man who might have been homeless, and [Girl] had said he looked scary, so [Aunt] had responded that it wasn’t nice to assume a man was scary just because of his looks, and suggested the man was probably nice, though they didn’t stop to actually talk to him.

On the way back, [Girl] complained she was tired from the walk and had wanted to call her parents to tell them she was tired, but [Aunt] refused to interrupt their date night for such a trivial reason and so offered to give [Girl] a piggyback ride home instead. Once they got home, [Girl] got ice cream for being a good sport about the unplanned chore.

I also learned that [Aunt] regularly refers to her medications as drugs, which technically they are. I suggested to [Girl]’s parents that they may want to encourage [Aunt] to use the term medicine instead when talking with [Girl] in the future.