Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion how do you explain the events of 9/11

I agree with you Dude that simple and straightforward is best. I find that the more vague and evasive I am, the more interested DD and DS become and the more info they want.

I also heartily agree lucounu that we are a death-averse society, preferring to pretend that we can all stay young forever. I had a consuming fear of death as a child and have tried very intentionally to teach my kids that death is a natural part of life.

It's particularly important in our family because DH and I both work in the criminal justice system where death is a regular part of our professional lives. DH defended a death penalty case for 3 months this year and we had lots of family discussion about that issue at the dinner table. My approach for all these issues has been to give basic, kid-edited information. Sometimes really bad things happen to kids in my world and that's much harder to explain and gets more heavily edited. Neither DD nor DS has an anxiety problem which would complicate these matters much more.

My professional life still has much less death and mayhem than say, "The Avengers" movie. Our society often glamorizes violence as entertainment. I also want my kids to understand that real violence is not at all entertaining and results in tragedy and loss to real people.

Yes, excellent language!

When talking danger, we also talk safety or protection strategies. This really helps anxious people feel less anxious, and is generally good training so that the kids will know what to do in the world if bad things happen.

DeeDee

Sometimes violence is needed to stop bad people, both domestic and foreign. If my children raised the topic of 9/11 I may mention that the Osama bin Laden, leader of al Qaeda, was recently killed by our Navy Seals.

Interestingly, this was also what brought out DD's awareness months later when she was a toddler. We had to 'talk her down' while she was a hysterical mess as a not-quite-3yo, and this was elicited by passing a very tall pulp mill stack on the freeway. So completely out of the blue-- if she hadn't been babbling about airplanes and "the building could fall down" I would never have put it together.

The upshot was that I will never forget the look of dawning horror as we-- trucks whizzing past us at 75mph-- explained that she didn't need to be worried about ALL airplanes, or tall buildings; that the events in question were not an accident. That look will haunt me forever, because that is when my sweet little girl learned that people really are capable of incomprehensible evil. I could see her put it together. She looked puzzled at first, and then insisted that I answer the direct question; "Someone crashed the airplane ON PURPOSE??" I explained it as mental illness of a sort. I have not regretted that.

I agree WHOLEHEARTEDLY about full disclosure to the greatest extent that our kids can handle it. The reason is that PG kids in particular are likely to absorb more information about the events than we think that they've been exposed to. Something this awful is so vastly age-inappropriate for them to try to manage alone.

Me too.

Same here.

Yes, I think that's very important. I let my sons watch some cartoonish violence such as in superhero movies, but even DS3 is learning that it's different in real life.

I would recommend that children with extreme sensitivity to such things not be shown such footage. But I also feel that a lot of children could be intellectually prepared to deal with such things at a young age, and that some seeming sensitivity is caused by unnecessary sheltering (not in your case). If a child has been taught that life is full of unicorns and fairy princesses who dispense light and magic wherever they go, of course it's going to be a bit shocking to see people plummeting to their deaths. A certain intellectual progression has to happen, and I'd expect an adult sheltered from reality to be easily distraught as well without having been properly taught.

But for a child with the proper basis for understanding the significance of what she sees, it should be fine; my son didn't bat an eye at that particular footage, though he was very interested and appropriately sad for the people that died. Many children aren't provided with that basis at a young age, at least in the US, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's nothing biological which prevents it. Being emotionally ready depends much more on intellectual preparedness than physical maturity.

That's a good point, and a thought that has influenced the way I'm raising our sons. Complete readiness for a concept is one thing, and a need to put it into the proper light another. Our kids wouldn't find a diet of "age appropriate" fluff satisfying on an intellectual level anyway. They're like many kids in my experience, with a healthy appetite for the interesting, bizarre, and macabre. And, perhaps due to their giftedness, they have a tendency to ask big moral questions early and often, and to be unsatisfied with vague answers.

ETA: I think there's an oversimplified understanding of the emotional needs of children, and it's furthered regarding gifted children by an oversimplified set of beliefs about asynchronized development. A five year old student studying high school concepts is probably emotionally ready for those concepts if presented on a solid foundation, though she may show some normal five-year-old emotional lability.

I agree.

My daughter is not over-sensitive that way, but we haven't really sheltered her from much. Part of that is because it was necessary (in our opinion) for her to NOT be sheltered from her (occasionally unpleasant/harsh) reality in a personal sense, and partly because it was frankly impossible in a child that reads young.

I mean, when they can read Newsweek and Time at the checkstand, the cat is out of the bag.

This prepared my daughter to have the emotional foundation to understand some of the most difficult topics taught in middle and high school. After all, genocide is a lesson in pretty much every history class. How else to place Anne Frank in context?

I'm of the belief that feeling horrible when one reads those things is normal. Translating that feeling into a resolve to make the world a BETTER place is no bad thing, I think.

I do have a child with some anxiety issues, so there's that. I could be accused of sheltering, I suppose. We do not watch the news or listen to NPR with DD around. I always answer questions honestly and pretty completely. DD is certainly aware of some basic ugly facts of history. However, to me there is a big difference between "Here are the facts of what happened" and "Here, let's watch a documentary with graphic footage of deaths." Similarly, there are books I'm not giving her at this time. She may come across them but I hope not yet. Her teacher gave her Anne Frank last year and I very earnestly asked her not to read it yet (she actually chose not to, to my surprise). She isn't ready. Some kids are walking live nerves with a raw heart very close to the surface. DD was crying about a dying dragonfly in the garden the other day. She cries about plastic in the ocean killing sea turtles. BTW, she has lost family members, so it's not that she's a child with no experience of true loss.

I wouldn't accuse you of anything.

I think every parent has some idea of what their particular child is capable of understanding and coping with at a given time.

It also seems to me that good parenting has long-term goals, knowing that eventually the child has to be exposed to the world and understand and cope with all that's out there. But that doesn't change the fact that some kids have to get to that full-coping-readiness on a slower curve than others do.

DeeDee

Yes. What a particular child can manage is completely individual.

ultramarina, I agree with DeeDee and HowlerKarma. It sounds like you're doing what you should do for your daughter. In addition I tend to agree with you that many young (U.S.) children wouldn't be ready for 9/11 footage-- we may only differ on the extent to which they could be.