Talking to Your Children About 9/11

By Akela Talamasca on September 11th, 2009

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Today marks the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. For many, the horror and shock of the event has given way to a lasting sorrow and pain that may never entirely fade. But while those of us who were around to have experienced it will spend the day remembering what we were doing on that day, many of us have children who will have no idea what it’s all about. How will you explain the terror and tragedy of 9/11?

The concept of terrorism is probably a little too complex and far-reaching for young minds. My son is five years old, and while I have no doubt he’d be able to understand some of it, I don’t want to plant a seed of fear in his mind that at any moment, someone’s going to fly in and crash into our house. That’s the trouble with a complicated political issue — there’s very little you can do to simplify it to the extent that it will still make sense to a child.

Instead, you might want to focus on the fact that people sometimes disagree with each other. Sometimes these disagreements don’t get worked out, and people get upset with each other. When they get upset, sometimes they try to hurt each other out of frustration. In a way, crashing planes into buildings is a larger version of one person throwing a punch at another.

So, another country was angry at the United States and wanted to hurt us. Why were they angry? Because we do things differently than they do, and they don’t understand why. This is, obviously, oversimplifying the issue, but it gets an important point across: not everyone in the world thinks the same way we do, and sometimes that causes problems. You can turn this into a conversation about the importance of communication and tolerance, and how lashing out in anger is never a good thing to do.

If you wanted to avoid this sort of higher-level talk, you could just say that our country is mourning a huge accident that occurred in 2001. A plane crashed, and a lot of people died. What you should stress in this case is that the accident served to bring the country together, and that it’s important that we learn how to comfort one another in times of crisis.

Depending on how old your child is, you may even find yourself trying to explain 9/11 in detail, and your child losing interest the longer you go on. It’s okay to drop it; there’s time later to go in-depth about what happened. The key to talking with your child about September 11th is to answer questions simply, without trying to explain a lot of history. Even we adults have a hard time getting our heads around it all, and your child might be just curious enough that a simple answer will do the job.