Seven-Year-Old Writes Heartbreaking Note On Arm During School Lockdown

Although I hope to be a parent one day, I currently have no kids of my own and have no plans to have any until I'm at least 30. I feel that gives me a fair bit of time to find someone to settle down with and continue living a relatively selfish existence for a little longer. Basically, I know how difficult being a parent is, and I'd like to put it off until I feel like a proper adult.

And parenting is not just difficult because it famously takes an entire village to raise a child, it's all the emotions that come with raising your little one into a hopefully grounded, decent adult too. Even the most laid back parents experience a degree of daily worry and fear because of the possibility that something terrible could happen to their baby.

Like I said, I may not be a parent, but I understand that worry is part and parcel of the job. When your kids start going to school, you have to contend with the fact that, possibly for the first time in their lives, they will spend a large chunk of their day away from you - and because you're not there, there's nothing you can do to keep them out of harm's way.

Credit: Pexels / Pixabay

I'm going to go ahead and say that, for the most part, parents of schoolchildren have nothing to worry about when it comes to their kids' safety at school. But, of course, this isn't always the case.

Shelley Harrison Reed came very close to believing that her children, 10-year-old Sean and seven-year-old Vanessa, were in grave danger at their school on one particularly harrowing day.

New Castle County school had received a bomb threat which Reed found out about on Facebook. She kept receiving notifications from the Facebook page for parents of students enrolled at the school. Reed was informed that following a bomb threat, the school had been placed on lockdown. Once the police were called, it was determined that school grounds were, in fact, secure.

So the students resumed their regular classes. When Reed's children were dropped off by the school bus after school, she asked them about the lockdown. Luckily, both of them seemed unaffected by the unsettling experience.

Or at least, that's what she initially thought.

Credit: Facebook/Shelley Harrison Reed

Later that day, Reed noticed something written on her daughter's arm and it's pretty heartbreaking.

Find out more about the very touching yet upsetting note from Reed's Facebook post:

"So my kids school had a genuine lockdown today. Some whack job called in a bomb threat

Police came and everything was fine, Thank God!

My guys seemed fine when they got home and they talked about it with me, and told me their versions of what happened and then went right into their homework and normal after school stuff, and all seemed fine.

It wasn't until later when Vanessa was changing out of her school uniform that I saw this on her arm....

I say to her, why did you write that on your arm?

She says, in case the bad guy got to us and I got killed, you and daddy would know that I love you, and she started to cry (as did I as I watched a little piece of her innocence get stolen away)

To know that my 7yo was put in a position to think that thought is absolutely gut wrenching and it's killing me inside

It's now been a couple [of] hours, and I can't seem to shake this awful feeling, feeling of sadness, fear, and plain disgusts for this new 'normal' our kids have to deal with on any given day.....it's a very scary and disturbing society we now live in, and it's heartbreaking

Sorry for the long post, I'm just thinking a lot of my mom friends who also went through this today are probably feeling the same way."

Credit: Facebook/Shelley Harrison Reed

While nothing bad happened to Reed's children, I understand why she was so affected by how her youngest child reacted to the situation. Bomb threats aren't what seven-year-olds should be agonising over, but I guess that's the world we're living in.