Posted by Sarah on June 24, 2009
After I wrote Do you tell your kids the fish is dead, a couple of people have found the site searching for “How do you tell your kids the fish is dead,” so I thought I should address that question.
How do you tell your kids the fish is dead?
Does the explanation differ according to the child’s age – or whether or not they are the ones who discovered the body.
I have to tell you, in our tank full of cories and bushynose plecos sometimes all we find is part of a skeleton, and then we have to determine which fish is dead by figuring out which one we don’t see anymore.
I think that might be a little more traumatic than seeing a fish that has just died.
I really haven’t thought about what or how I’m going to tell the baby when she’s old enough to start wondering what happened to the fish.
It’s something we’ll definitely have to think about though – with all of our fish now deaths and disappearances are going to be a part of life.
Of course there’s the chance she might not care or notice missing fish at all, but if she’s anything like her dad and me she’ll have at least one favorite.
How did you tell your kids the fish is dead?
Do you remember how your parents told you your fish had died when you were younger?
Posted by Sarah on June 16, 2009
How long do you leave the lights on in your fish tank?
When we first got our fish we started turning the lights on when we fed the fish in the morning, and turning them off when we fed them at night – or if the lights were bothering us while we were watching tv.
After a year or so I started reading that the lights really only need to be on if you want to look at the fish, so we just started turning the lights on when we wanted to look at them, unless we were dealing with a planted tank, or the salt water tank.
The fish don’t really seem to care about the lights, and we have enough natural light in our house so that we can see the fish pretty well most of the time.
If we do have the curtains closed and it’s dark in the room, we’ll leave the lights on for a few hours, just because.
How often do you leave the lights on in your fish tank?
Do you use a timer, or turn them on manually?
Posted by Sarah on June 12, 2009
Someone found the site while they were searching for information about how to scare their puffer.
Do you scare your fish?
I don’t normally try to scare the fish – if I think they are dead I might get the net out and check, and I’m sure that scares them.
I also show the bettas the mirror so they can get some excercise by flaring at it, and while that might scare them, I’m not really sure.
Have you ever tried to scare your fish?
I just realized this person probably wants the puffer to puff up, but I don’t think that normally happens unless something is wrong.
8-ball didn’t even puff up when he jumped out of the bowl we were transporting him in when we moved him from one tank to another.
Of course that’s a good thing since puffing up out of water can be bad for the puffers, and since I don’t know how to treat that I’d have to waste time looking it up online.
Hopefully I’ll never have to know.
Have you ever tried to scare your fish?
Have you ever seen your puffer puff?
Posted by Sarah on May 5, 2009
I read a post on a beauty forum a few weeks ago from a woman who’s children’s betta was dying.
She’d already replaced one dead betta without telling her kids that their fish had died, and she was asking if she should replace this one if the fish died, or if she should just tell her kids the fish was dead.
What would you do?
Since I don’t have kids yet, I’m not really sure what I’d do, but I think that I’d tell the kids the fish died.
My sister and I had a fish tank when we were younger, and although I’m sure that some of the fish died, I really don’t remember anything about it, so I guess I wasn’t too traumatized by their deaths.
I do remember that our rabbit died when we were young, and our dog died when I was a teenager, and I was traumatized by that.
I don’t know if experiencing death through the fish first helped with the loss of the other pets, but I think it must have.
Since we have so many fish now, and since some of them are hard to find around here, we aren’t going to be able to replace the fish without the baby knowing.
After all I’ve never seen sapphire green discus around here, and even if we did, I don’t think I will want to spend $40-60 to keep the baby blissfully unaware of death for a little bit longer.
Is that wrong?
What am I thinking – there’s no way we could match the size of the discus and some of the other fish that are sold as juveniles even if they did carry them locally.
Even with some of our more common fish, I wouldn’t want to put them into a tank without quarantining them, unless I was sure that the replacement fish were healthy.
I’ve heard rumors about replacing dead fish or dead pets with other pets that looked the same, or very similar.
Some kids never find out, some kids do, but pretend they don’t know the pet was replaced, and some kids find out and feel betrayed that their parents lied to them, which can really damage the trust between the parents and their kids.
Have you ever replaced your kids dead fish with a new one?
Would you ever do that, or would you tell your kids the fish died?
Have your parents ever replaced your dead fish?
How did you find out about it?
