 Coping
with the 9.11.01 Aftermath
9.11 Coping Strategies
Children's Worries Take New
Shape
Artwork Reveals the Effects of Sept. 11
Terror and death were the
overwhelming themes in a poll of children ages 6 to 11 who were asked to picture
likes, dislikes, hopes and fears. (Sesame Workshop)
They'll remember Sept. 11 the rest of their lives. They may be changed for
good.
If you have any doubt that this country is engaged in a war on our shores,
ask a child of 10 or 11. Have her draw a picture of something in her
neighborhood that she's afraid of. Ask her to illustrate her worries about the
future.
That's what Sesame Workshop, creators of television's "Sesame Street," did in
the weeks after the terrorist attacks, and the results were both simple and
profound. At shopping malls across the United States, youngsters ages 6 to 11
drew pictures of collapsed buildings and fallen planes, soldiers in camouflage
and family graveyards, nuclear explosions and total darkness.
"If [the terrorists] could get the famous Twin Towers they could get in a
regular building like mine," one child wrote. Said another, "I'm afraid we will
be bombed again and it will be World War III. I hate technology."
Last May, in an identical study, youngsters drew spiders, snakes and other
ordinary monsters of childhood. But these are not ordinary times. Before
September, the only bully many kids feared was the swaggerer on the playground.
Growing up amid prosperity and peace, their biggest concern was why Mom
didn't let them listen to rap. Kids worried about gun violence, according to the
earlier survey, but shootings were, for many of them, something that happened to
other kids in other neighborhoods.
The new study, to be made public Monday in Washington, shows how much has
changed.
Hijacked airplanes and collapsing buildings, shown on TV dozens of times,
seem closer. So does a military campaign overseas, coupled with the incessant
rhetoric of war.
One child attached a photo of utter blackness to her composition. "This is a
picture of nothing," she wrote underneath. "Because the president said we might
have a nuclear war and the world will look like this."
The issue is of such general concern that today Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) is
scheduled to hold a "Hearing on Kids and Terrorism."
In both May and September the children were asked to describe and draw
pictures of their likes, dislikes, hopes and fears; older children were provided
with disposable cameras, as well as workbooks.
The questions were intentionally general, according to Susan Royer, the
workshop's vice president for research. The September survey made no mention of
terrorism. Yet terrorism is exactly what the older children wrote about with a
pervasive sadness that surprised her. In the May study, "we saw lots of
graveyards with one grave," she says. "In this second study, we saw many
gravestones."
Children in the first study said they were afraid of losing playgrounds to
pollution; second-wave children, whether in Santa Ana or Brooklyn, were scared
of losing parents to Osama bin Laden.
"My worries is that terrist [sic] will harm my family, and I will be left
with no family like the kids in New York," one child wrote.
"There was a real feeling it could happen to me, no matter where I live,"
Royer says of the children's responses. Also, "the fear of war never came up in
the first survey. It came up a lot in this one."
In a couple of ways, Royer and others at Sesame Workshop found the second
study more encouraging than the first. Children in May identified pop stars and
athletes as heroes, in particular Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Michael
Jordan. In September, those idols had been replaced by firefighters and police
officers and the teenagers down the block who washed cars to raise money for
victims' families.
September's children spoke of neighborhoods coming together in unprecedented
ways: a Chinese couple in Brooklyn who previously kept to themselves now
visiting with other families; a girl now determined to play "with everyone on
the playground." They talked about the American flag as a symbol not just of
freedom but also of "everybody helping each other." They took from the media a
more balanced view of life than might have been expected, according to Kyle
Pruett, a child psychiatry professor at the Yale Child Study Center, who was a
consultant on the study.
The children also imagined themselves as heroes, saying they wanted to be
able to fly "to stop the bad guys," to "touch a cloud so if someone is about to
be hurt I could lift them," to predict the future "so that I would know what's
going to happen before it actually happens and that way help people by warning
them." Such visualization is a coping mechanism that didn't surface in the May
study, according to Royer.
And how will they cope long-term? "It's hard to say whether their feelings
will go away," Pruett says. "They're like children raised on the San Andreas
fault. Every tremor they feel from now on may evoke fear."
Those old enough to remember diving under school desks as kids during the
air-raid drills of the 1950s can sympathize. So can younger adults who watched
the Challenger space shuttle explode. Such national catastrophes shape the
template on which we build our lives, particularly when we're young, says Wendy
Zevin, an Arlington psychologist who works with traumatized children.
How much emotional wreckage this particular crisis leaves depends on its
duration, other events that may compound its seriousness and, particularly, the
reaction of adults, Zevin says. Will parents and teachers give kids lots of
opportunities to describe their feelings, thereby teaching that language is a
tool for mastering the environment? Will they help kids distinguish the
difference between feelings and facts? Will they resurrect comforting routines
of play and work? Will they -- can they -- remain calm and confident themselves?
"I was 10 when John F. Kennedy was shot, and what I remember are the
grown-ups," Zevin says.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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