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

DD#1 who is 9 learned about 9/11 for the first time last year in school. She knows the gist of it but what she doesn't really know is that they were passenger planes with passengers on them. This is not something I'm going to tell her about either seeing how dh travels extensively for work (globally) and I don't need to create any more anxiety for her than she already has.

She sounds so much like my oldest dd. She is extremely sensitive and it is difficult when she wants to know everything about the world and yet gets so upset about the truths of it all.

I'm with you there. I'd never let my two watch this.

They're starting to watch scarier/less innocent movies, but we talk about how it's fake (stunts, make up, computer editing, etc etc). Discussing what happened on 9/11 is a far cry from letting my kids watch someone fall out of a building and not be able to tell them it's just a stunt man. It's just too... graphic and haunting. And so sad.

I keep coming back to this. It doesn't make sense to me. I have never hidden the reality of death from my children or taught them to believe that life is a happy unicorn merry-go-round. Regardless, seeing innocent people plummet to their deaths as the result of a heinous, cowardly surprise attack would certainly be more than a bit shocking to them.

I see no way to "properly teach them" not to be shocked by it. I hope not to teach them this, in fact.

I think it's about balance. Part of our job is to prepare them for life later on and sheltering them is not going to do that. At our house we watch the news, and we talk about unfortunate things that sometimes happen in the world.

We can each only make choices that are right for the ages and sensitivity levels of our kids (some sensitivities are inherent and not developed through excessive sheltering).

My personal feeling is that watching the 9/11 footage is not going to benefit them. Watching news coverage of a death due to drunk driving, on the other hand, can by teaching them a life lesson. They can choose whether or not they travel with a drunk driver, but they can't choose what actions terrorists take.

When Mr W asked, I gave him the truth in highlight form.

He knows he comes from a military family and his GF is a cop. And he has several great uncles who died in war or who came back changed. He also has relative who farm and hears those discussions.

Okay. Fixed. You're right that it's inherently somewhat shocking or at least surprising to see people fall from a skyscraper during an unprecedented terrorist attack-- but in context the point was, of course, that people can learn to tolerate such things so that they're not incapacitated by them, not that we should be blase about sudden catastrophes. We can zero in on a single word typed in a post and ignore the rest of the post, or we can move on and discuss the actual ideas we're presenting to each other.

Thanks to the way my son has been introduced to the topic of 9/11 and many others, I can have a healthy discussion with him about world political events without whitewashing or hiding anything. He would have arrived at his current level of understanding at some point anyway, unless he lived in a locked room without access to media; he has just arrived at it earlier than many people do, but this fits with his accelerated intellectual development. I see no more reason to shield him from truths he's ready to learn than I do to lie to him about Santa Claus when he's figured out the fake.

I agree, and a constantly shifting one at that with a rapidly developing intellect.

This is a tricky statement. Some sheltering is inherent in your idea of balance, but people obviously can assign different meanings to "excessive". And while I'm not a psychologist, it's obvious to me that though one might have a genetic predisposition to neuroses, anxiety disorders and the like, a large component of almost all human behavior is learned as well. Just as one may learn to lessen anxiety in therapy, anxiety can be caused or heightened with the wrong approach too.

As an example, when my son briefly showed a beginning tendency to be afraid of the dark, instead of leaving the lights on at night and giving him a big flashlight, which would have avoided expressions of fear but actually validated and strengthened the fear itself, I worked to help him dispel it. It seems to me that unhealthy anxiety can be completely avoided with the right approach, at least with some people, and I think my son's proof of that; he has no anxiety over discussions of 9/11 at all.

I would say that whatever criteria one would normally use for exposing a person under one's care to a new idea should apply to a HG+ child, but notions tied somehow to age should be discarded. Just like with math or any other subject, someone's ready to understand a new concept when the proper foundation's been laid, and that can happen at an earlier age for a gifted person than normal.

I think the footage benefits my son in the same ways it benefits me. The factual detail is interesting and good to know from a historical perspective. It also helps to highlight the enormity of the 9/11 attacks; a terse mention that nearly 3,000 people died in an attack just doesn't do the topic justice, in my opinion. And knowing more about the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath means my son understands more about other world events too.

Iucounu, with all due respect, I think maybe you don't know how it is to live inside the body of a really sensitive person. You seem to be a very analytical person who can easily put some intellectual distance between yourself and these events, and perhaps your son is too. I am actually not nearly as sensitive as my daughter; I'm somewhere in the middle, so I have some sense of what it's like on both ends. Anyway, sometimes people who are not sensitive mistake sensitivity for weakness or some sort of personality flaw. I'd remind you to keep in mind that sometimes very sensitive people are incredibly brave and are, in fact, the people who do the most in the world to change things. You haven't met my daughter, but let me assure you that while she cries over a dead dragonfly, she is, at the same time, the kind of person who would stand up to the tanks in Tiananmen square. I am not kidding in the least.

And fwiw, anxiety and sensitivity, while often linked, are not the same thing.

The key words there are "at least with some people." It is great that your DS is not a chronically anxious person.

It is very important, and also a kindness to parents, to recognize that not all anxiety in children is caused by parenting. Many anxious children are wired that way. Good parenting mitigates the anxiety by teaching coping skills, but different people start with different baselines.

DeeDee