History gets new event for timeline

During a rare break from the TV news out of New York and Washington, D.C., I was reminded of my daughter’s recent school assignment.

She had to make a timeline of history, based on the earliest memories that defined the lives of different generations of her family. Her grandmother told her about hearing of Pearl Harbor as a girl. That was the big one. For me, I told my daughter, there were the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And Vietnam, of course.

At that moment, my daughter’s memories of national consequence were largely vague and unformed. She was a baby when the shuttle Challenger exploded. The Gulf War might as well have been the Civil War, for all its effect on her life. Even the Oklahoma City bombing seemed ages ago. The closest her generation had to a national crisis, perhaps, was the school shootings at Columbine.

Just two days later, all that changed for my daughter, for every child. Never again would they have to search their memories for that singular moment when their world was altered. Their timeline was now marked with an indelible date. They have Sept. 11, 2001, forever. They have their own day of infamy.

As we adults try to make sense of it all – the unfathomable death toll to come, the lost sense of national security, the “quiet anger” that is slowly supplanting our disbelief – we also wonder how our children will process this emotional overload of tragedy, fear and grief. How will they emerge from this national nightmare?

Dr. Russ Quaglia has been thinking a lot about children since that infamous Tuesday. As the director the National Center for Student Aspirations, based at the University of Maine, he speaks to parents and educators around the world about how they can help youngsters have a healthy view of the world and of their future roles in it. Quaglia worries when he hears that some teachers and parents have chosen to shield their children entirely from the recent tragedy, as if it had never happened. How can we hope to allay their fears, he asks, if we don’t even ask them if they’re afraid?

“If a child is old enough to see the images on TV, they’re old enough to have some answers,” Quaglia said at his home in Orono on Wednesday, shortly after being interviewed by National Public Radio about how adults can best speak with children about the unfolding tragedy. “This subject is wall-to-wall in their lives. They can’t avoid it. And I think it’s the responsibility of every adult who deals with children to discuss this with them.”

Quaglia urged parents to first ask the children what they know about the crisis and take the discussion from there. Let the children determine its direction.

“Once they’ve told you what they know, ask them what they think of it,” he said. “I think it’s actually more challenging to work with younger children on this than older children. Kids who are 13 or older think they’re invincible. They might not care to talk about it with you because it seems so far removed from them. Some of them were probably more shaken by the school violence than by this terrorism. They can identify more with school.”

The younger children, however, might harbor a fear that is more pervasive and undefined. A child might be afraid to hear that Daddy is going to fly because all airplanes crash into skyscrapers. He worries that Mommy works in a big building in Bangor, because big buildings tumble to the ground with people inside. He saw it on TV, over and over.

“The challenge for us is to make sure our children don’t live in fear of what might happen,” said Quaglia, “but rather to give them hope that good things will happen, today and in the future. We have to make sure they see nothing but a promising future.”

To do that, he said, we must talk about how people come together for a common cause, who have the confidence to stand up for what’s right. We should speak of the everyday heroes who have emerged throughout the crisis – the firefighters and police in New York, the people standing in long lines to give blood in Maine or Idaho.

Quaglia said he’s uncomfortable with the repeated references to this act of terrorism being the younger generation’s Pearl Harbor. While that attack did rally our nation 60 years ago, strengthening our resolve against tyranny in the most remarkable ways, it also created racial and cultural prejudices that many young Americans of that time carried with them into adulthood.

“It’s a natural thing for children to wonder why people would do this terrible thing to us, and why they hate us so much,” he said. “Most adults can’t quite understand it. But if we don’t talk about this with the kids, I’m afraid we could have a generation who learns to hate the Arab world – a whole race of people blamed for the actions of a few. So what a great opportunity this is for parents, educators and kids to share their perceptions honestly about the world, to make sure that our rage doesn’t turn into vengeance.”

Most of all, Quaglia said, we adults have a responsibility to ensure that the horror our children have experienced alongside us does not control their lives.

“We’re the role models for our kids, just as parents in Palestine are the models for those children cheering the deaths of Americans on the news,” he said. “But we have to model a spirit that believes in the future, and in all humanity. The kids have to know that not every day will be like the ones we’re going through now.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.