“Today is a special day” one of my 2nd grade boys shared today.  “And what day would that be?”, I asked.  “It’s the day the airplanes flew into the two tall buildings and people died”.  The other little faces in the room looked concerned and hands shot in the air.  I immediately felt put on the spot.  This is something parents should talk about with their kids, not me.  They’re the ones who know how much they can handle and they’re only 7 or 8 years old for goodness sake.  So, I started by saying this would be a great thing to talk to mom and dad about when they got home today.  But that was not enough and I could see by their faces that they were becoming scared, so I decided to answer questions to the best of my ability.  After all, I’m a teacher, right?  I was older when it happened and their parents, for the most part, were teenagers.  Like my sons were when it happened.

I remember my own kids on that horrendous day.  It changed how they looked at the world.  And now, those same aged kids are parents to the students in my class.  When I was young, I think parents would try to do everything they could to shield kids from things like this and reassure them that everything was going to be okay, that grownups were in charge and would take care of them. But these parents lived through it as kids, and maybe because of that they believe their kids shouldn’t be shielded from some of the awful truths out there.  I don’t know.  But from what I could tell, my students knew just enough to be scared.

Questions like, how did the bad guys get on the plane?  How many were there?  What were their names?  How did they take over the plane?  Can bad guys still do that?  Did children die on the planes?  I answered as honestly and briefly as I could, but there was still that part of me that wanted to reassure them that adults were taking care of this the best they could.  I explained that there were a lot of rules now on airplanes to make them safer, that they checked everyone’s bags to make sure there wasn’t anything dangerous in them.  That cockpit doors are now locked so bad guys can’t get in like they did before.  This seemed to reassure them a bit but then more questions.

Did people die in the buildings?  Was it a lot of people? And again, did children die?  What was I going to say?  Yes probably on the planes, some children died.  Why would someone do that?  How do you answer that one?  It’s still beyond my scope of thinking how human beings could do this to one another.  And yet everyday, I read about some atrocities inflicted on human beings by other human beings.  How do you shield kids from this?

I think as adults we need to be more aware of what kids are allowed to see but also be aware that when they do see or hear about something that might concern them that we address it directly but only in as much detail as they ask about.  In kid language.  In one of my other blogs I asked the question, has technology fooled us into thinking kids are more mature than they used to be?  I believe it has, with all my heart as well as my head.  The same things that have scared kids for generations still scare kids.  The fear of being hurt, being left alone, of losing their parents or families.  And they have no concept of time.  They were imagining this just happened.  And when I told them it happened 16 years ago, one of the remarked, “oh, that was a LONG time ago!”.

I remember as a kid, probably 4 or 5, seeing a story on the news about a huge fire somewhere that was burning up an entire town.  I couldn’t even begin to tell you where this was, but my fear was that it was MY town that was burning and it was going to get us.  It didn’t even occur to my parents that I had picked this up and I had nightmares for days.  Finally my parents figured it out and explained to me that it was a town really far away and it wasn’t going to get to us.  Kids have not changed.  As adults, we need to be vigilant for the sake of our kids.  The news is 24/7 now and with screens everywhere, kids are bound to pick up things they are not mature enough to handle.  And we need to be there to make sure they understand it’s our job to keep them safe from those ugly, sometimes scary things going on.

After about 10 minutes of this conversation, we finally got back to music class and I watched them become kids again for awhile, laughing and playing with each other.  This is the way children were meant to be, playful and carefree.  They have plenty of time to be adults to worry about the craziness in the world, but such a very short time to just be kids.  I pray that this generation of children learns to live with each other in such a way that this type of event will become a thing of the past and that their children will enjoy their childhood without being scared.