My Children are 7 and 5. Kids at their school are starting to talk about September 11, and they had at least mentioned it. While I did not want to do anything to remove their naivete at this fragile age, I felt the time had come to discuss things with them, at least generally.
The first thing I did was solicit input from my friends on Facebook. It had a remarkable network effect, in that people started talking to their friends and posting the question in other places as well, such as Quora and LinkedIn. A tremendous number of my friends emailed me, messaged me and posted comments demonstrating that many people had the same questions I did.
As a result, I decided to post this note.
The first piece of advice I received was not to preview that I was going to talk about something scary, and the second piece of advice I received was to talk about the importance not not hating others. These two pieces of advice served as the anchor for my discussion.
The concept of “hate” is something five year olds are just starting to learn. And we, as parents, generally try to teach our kids that the word and the concept is ugly. So that’s where I started. In talking with my five year old, we talked about whether people use the word “hate” at school. i explained why Mommy and I use a punishment called “yuckmouth” (this is a punishment where when the kids misbehave, they have to eat something that tastes bad and can’t have water for 5 minutes to wash it out) when they use a word like “hate.” I also asked him why people at school get in trouble for pushing and hitting. He explained to me that they get in trouble for using those words and activities because they are expected to get along.
I used this understanding as a vehicle to explain that we teach him those things because, as people get older, they have more trouble knowing how to get along. And that hate makes people want to hurt each other more and more, moving from hitting to punching to kicking and so on. I explained that there are people who learn to hate and sometimes they do bad things. I also explained that good guys, like my brother in the military, work very hard to make sure people who hate don’t try to hurt us.
We then talked a lot about Pearl Harbor. I explained that, far away in Hawaii, when his grandfather was just 5 years old, some people who hated America bombed Hawaii by using airplanes. I explained that even though America had been around for a really really long time, this was one of the first times that someone came to America and hurt people. We then talked about how, ten years ago, some other people flew airplanes into buildings far away in New York. I explained that a lot of heroes helped people, and I thought they could be heroes some day and help people too. My kids asked who made the airplanes fly into the buildings, and I answered Osama bin Laden. The kids asked many questions about Osama bin Laden, where he lived, what country he was from, and why he didn’t like Americans. I gave them short, fair answers. I then explained that heroes, like those on September 11, my brother in the military, and soldiers, searched the world, found Osama bin Laden and “got him.” (I did not say that they killed bin Laden. They were satisfied with my general answer). They were satisfied with the answer.
I should note that I told my 5 year old about all of this first while we were driving in the car. When we picked up my 7 year old, he asked me to tell her and then interrupted me to add his own gloss.
We concluded our discussion by talking about the importance of history, and that we have all learned to teach our children not to hate or to push/hit/etc. because we do not want these sorts of things to ever happen again. And that’s why we do things like “yuckmouth” to make sure the kids learn the right lessons.
My son asked to see some videos online repeatedly. I offered to show him the Nick News Video, but I told him it was a bit long (personally, I think the video is better suited for the 8 and up crowd but it is terrific). He decided he would rather watch Little Einsteins.
The most important things I learned in this exercise was (a) that we, as a community, are still grieving 10 years later and can come together to discuss how to share this event with people who were not with us during this tragedy and (b) that there is a way to discuss these events with children in a way that encourages them to love each other and learn the values that make America a great place.
Thanks to everyone who shared their experiences. It took that village to help me talk to my kids about September 11.