Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Why you need to talk to your children about 9/11

Children who were very young six years ago today, or who weren't even born yet, are of an age now to understand the events of 9/11 differently than they once did. Don't avoid the conversation.

As new levels of cognition kick in at each new stage of development, it can almost be as if a child is hearing about a tragedy like this for the first time. I'm remembering hearing some years ago about a 3-year-old who lost his father. When he turned 6, he stated tearfully to his mother, "Daddy's never coming back, is he?" It was a painful moment for the mom, but it was only then that the child had the cognitive tools to understand that death is forever.

A child who has been old enough for the past few years to have heard about 9/11, say a 5- to 8-year-old, may be understanding some nuance he hadn't previously grasped. Even a middle- or high-schooler may be putting things together in new ways. If you're a parent who is travelling for work in the next days, weeks or months and, out of the blue, your 7-year-old is peppering you with questions about airplane or travel safety, or even begging you not to go, consider that his or her new level of cognition enables her to put old information together to form a new thought: "Uh oh. Airplanes can be dangerous. Daddy goes on airplanes a lot. He could get hurt."

Think of it this way: The child who was 2 or 3 or 4 six years ago, is hearing about the events of 9/11 with a different brain. For some, it may even seem as if it is happening again, right now, for the first time. Their worries may be very ego-centric: "Am I safe? Is my family safe? Is our country safe?" Some children will voice these concerns aloud. Those parents are the lucky ones. For some children, a worry may surface in uncharacteristic behavior, especially changes in eating or sleeping patterns. For the vast majority of kids, the day will come and go without any apparent blip. That doesn't mean, however, that the information isn't just sitting there, waiting to be processed when some seemingly unconnected event triggers a magical connection for them: "Mommy works in a tall building. Tall buildings aren't safe. I don't want mommy to go to work."

So what's a parent to do?

For starters, find out from the teacher if the subject came up in school today in any way. Even if it didn't, that doesn't mean it didn't come up in conversation on the school bus or among friends. Either way, my suggestion is to have a simple conversaton tonight at dinner, perhaps a moment of silence for the tragic events that happened six years ago. Ask your child, "Did you hear people talking today about 9/11? Tell me what you know/heard." If he says, "Nothing," tell him, "Well, if you have any questions, it's OK to ask me." If your kids are mixed ages with one old enough to remember and one not, it's OK to have the conversation with them together, but remind the older one that the younger doesn't remember it.

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

1.Remind a young child that this happened six years ago (as opposed to yesterday or today); that's a long time for a young child.

2. It's OK to say that it was a very sad day, and that you were very sad. If you know someone who died that day, talk about the person but keep in mind that your audience is a young child. For instance, if you cry in the retelling, it's good for a child to see that you can have a cry and then pull yourself together and move on.

3. Point to the many safety precautions in place in our country to keep us safe, like when you travel on an airplane, there are lots of security check points. Here's a good statement for a young child to hear even if you don't think it's 100 percent true: "The government is doing all it can to keep us safe."

The best advice? Keep it simple. The idea is to make the subject talkable. By not mentioning 9/11 at all today, a child of any age could conclude any number of things from thinking that it's so upsetting or scary, you can't even talk about it, to thinking that you are a hard, calloused person who doesn't even care that all those people died, to anything inbetween.

Posted by Barbara Meltz at 10:50 AM

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