My kids were nine and six on September 11, 2001.?‚? They stayed at school that day, and heard appropriate dribs and drabs of what what was going on.?‚? At home, their father and I, who were still married at the time, told them that terrorists flew airplanes into the Twin Towers in New York and they collapsed, killing thousands of people.?‚? How sad it was.?‚? How wrong it was.?‚? How sad we were. How wronged we felt. I was outwardly distraught, inwardly panic-stricken.?‚? I sat riveted to the television watching the unimaginable events come to life before my eyes. But my kids, safe in a Midwestern suburb, with their parents safe not far away, continued watching watching Sponge Bob, Power Rangers and Arthur.

Now, on September 11, 2006, my kids are 14 and 11. They?‚? are much better equipped to handle some of the images that will be replayed today. They’re politically aware and they’re savvy.?‚? But, I’m still going to choose what they see today, and how they see it.?‚? At their ages, five years is a lifetime.?‚?

They remember nothing?‚? but growing up in a world when homeland?‚? security is?‚? familiar terminology?‚? and the war on terror is a known entity.?‚? They will live their most formative and memorable years at a time where we do not take safety for granted.?‚? They instinctively?‚? take off their shoes before going through airport security.?‚? ?‚? Their trips?‚? to New York City will only ever include visits to a changing Ground Zero and pointing fingers to where the towers once stood, and then fell.

While I believe it’s my job to convey the seriousness of the events that enveloped our nation that day, I also believe in allowing?‚? my children to continue to exist in the safety of their world that was untouched.?‚? While it feels like yesterday to me, it feels like history to them.?‚?

I don’t want my?‚? kids completely shielded from reality,?‚? I just want them to be kids.?‚? I want to help them understand, at?‚? an age-appropriate level,?‚? what happened then as well as what is happening now.?‚? What I?‚? don’t want is for this information to color the world they know - which is good - albeit with its own inherent flaws.?‚? ?‚?

I usually encourage my kids to hunker down next to me and watch the news.

Not today.?‚?

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When I look back and think how I viewed Vietnam as a young child, it was with naive apathy even though my father served in that war. I think my mother made a valiant effort to keep the news turned off as I would overhear her tell her friends that she couldn’t believe the whole war was being broad-casted on television for children’s eyes to see. The only time she did turn it onΒ was one specific incidentΒ in which weΒ thought our father was being interviewed and wanted to see him in his truest celebrity form; he service in the army catapulted him to stardom in our eyes anyway. Unfortunately, his soundbite was cut and instead we saw carnage and bombs as my mother rushed over to turn it off, as we bombarded her with questions about the safety of my father and why those people were so angry.

9/11 was harder yet to shield from kids. When I was a kid, there were only 4 stations. I believe even the Cartoon Network aired the tumbling towers over and over again in the aftermath of the twin tower attacks. Kids could not escape it. Thank goodness my son was much too young to comprehend what was going on, but for those children in elementary school, did anyone ever stop and ask them how they felt about it, either at the time or about the effects it has on them now? If a picture can sum it all up, here’s a heartbreaking reminder than children’s hearts were probably hurting too:

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Chuck Raasch, from the Gannett News Service on www.freep.com explores the psychological influence 9/11 had on children:

Nation/World
9/11 left scars on minds of children

September 10, 2006

BY CHUCK RAASCH
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON — In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, University of Texas education professor Patricia Somers studied the drawings of children and interviewed hundreds of college students around the country.

One thing struck her: how the images of the World Trade Center collapsing had stuck so firmly in the psyches of these young people. Time and time again, the twin towers came tumbling down on television. And the images became impossible to unravel from young memories, despite parents’ efforts to shelter their children. Somers said the net effect created “the photographic memory of id” — an indelible image in the American psyche.

“When I talk to” college students, “they seem to be able to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing and watching on TV, even which station they were watching,” Somers said.

For younger children, the impact was more diffuse. Somers said the drawings of children of elementary school age made after 9/11 often depicted many buildings falling, not just the same two over and over, as if a lot more than the twin towers were tumbling down. Read the rest…

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