For parents and kids alike, 9/11 left its imprints

JOCELYN NOVECK

AP National Writer

NEW YORK — David Rand cheer­fully acknowl­edges he’s an over­pro­tec­tive father. An ex-Marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’s also a sin­gle dad to 5-year-old Emma.

And so when Emma’s grand­mother sug­gested recently that the girl come visit her in Texas, fly­ing from Cal­i­for­nia as an unac­com­pa­nied minor, Rand had a blunt reac­tion: “Heck, no!”

He cites Sept. 11 as part of the rea­son. “The images just go through your mind,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if some­thing ter­ri­ble hap­pened and I wasn’t with her. If she were alone, and it was an attack — the guilt would just be too much.”

Ten years after the attacks, there’s no ques­tion that Sept. 11 con­tin­ues to impact our national psy­che, and some of that can be seen in how we raise our chil­dren. The Asso­ci­ated Press spoke with a num­ber of fam­i­lies around the coun­try and found that for some par­ents, the broader sense of inse­cu­rity and shaken con­fi­dence that accom­pa­nied the dis­as­ter has man­i­fested itself in very con­crete ways: Tight­en­ing cur­fews, giv­ing chil­dren cell phones to keep bet­ter track of them, even bar­ring them from air travel.

First and fore­most, par­ents strug­gle with how and when to explain the dis­as­ter, espe­cially to younger kids. For many chil­dren born after 2001, Sept. 11 is sim­ply part of the wall­pa­per of their gen­er­a­tion — not unlike like the JFK assas­si­na­tion for baby boomers. But other kids, espe­cially those old enough to remem­ber the attacks, are more con­scious of it.

And their response to it can change over time. “Chil­dren, as they get older, rethink cer­tain events and come to a new under­stand­ing of them,” says Dr. David Schon­feld of the Cincin­nati Children’s Hos­pi­tal Med­ical Cen­ter, who spent more than two years work­ing with chil­dren in New York City schools after the attacks. “What you first explain to a 7-year-old comes back dif­fer­ently when they’re 17 and leav­ing for college.”

Rand, the ex-Marine, now a 31-year-old col­lege stu­dent in Sacra­mento, says his daugh­ter “hasn’t asked” about 9/11, “and I haven’t vol­un­teered the infor­ma­tion. I wouldn’t want to scare a 5-year-old to death.”

When the time is right, though, he will tell her. And he’s also open to bring­ing her to New York some day. “The odds of the same thing hap­pen­ing are so remote,” he says.

Across the coun­try in Mass­a­chu­setts, Kelly John­son, 28, has spo­ken openly about 9/11 to her 7-year-old, Sea­mus. “I don’t how else to talk to him but to be truth­ful,” says John­son, who lives in Fitch­burg. “He’s a very smart kid.” She’s not sure, though, if he’s absorbed all the details: “He’s more focused on the firefighters.”

But the attacks haven’t changed her approach to rais­ing kids, she says: “I’m the type of per­son who moves for­ward, and looks for the good. That’s how I par­ent, too.”

John­son has no trou­ble let­ting Sea­mus travel by plane — he’s even flown as an unac­com­pa­nied minor. That’s an expe­ri­ence Karen Hunt’s kids — ages 15, 12 and 5 — won’t likely have.

Hunt and her fam­ily had been sched­uled to fly to Col­orado on Sept. 11, 2001, and none of them has been on a plane since. “We just don’t want to be one of the casu­al­ties,” says Hunt, 36.

In the years since the attacks, they moved from Port­land some 20 miles away to Sandy, to be away from the city. Both par­ents got new jobs. The fam­ily will visit Seat­tle — by car — but not the Space Nee­dle, and they will not go to large cities like Los Ange­les or New York.

Hunt says one of her kids has men­tioned study­ing in Europe for col­lege. She is res­olutely against it — “unless they make one hell of a bridge that goes across the ocean,” she says.

Some fam­i­lies feel the rever­ber­a­tions of 9/11 far less. Deanna Crask-Stone, a mother of two in Gallup, N.M., says that while she and her hus­band may be more vig­i­lant when they travel, the fam­ily oth­er­wise doesn’t think much about the attacks.

“Maybe if we lived else­where we’d think about ter­ror­ism more,” she says. “In the big city you need to take dif­fer­ent precautions.”

Her son Jesse, 11, paid atten­tion when Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces ear­lier this year. “But as far as 9/11, I’m really not sure how aware he is,” says Crask-Stone. Queried by a reporter, Jesse said he didn’t really recall what hap­pened on Sept. 11.

It’s dif­fer­ent for the vast major­ity of kids in New York. “For New York chil­dren in par­tic­u­lar, this in an indeli­ble part of their DNA now,” says Christy Ferer, whose hus­band, for­mer Port Author­ity exec­u­tive direc­tor Neil D. Levin, died in the attacks. “They will have to live with the feel­ing of poten­tial ter­ror­ism for the rest of their lives — a lot longer than us adults.”

Ferer, who is now chair­man of devel­op­ment for the 9/11 memo­r­ial in lower Man­hat­tan, chan­neled some of her grief into a project that brought kids together to cre­ate works of art about the attacks. Those art­works, cre­ated not long after Sept. 11, have been formed into a book, “Art for Heart: Remem­ber­ing 9/11” (Assouline), to be released in early Sep­tem­ber, with pro­ceeds going to the memorial.

The book includes a poem Megan Greene wrote about her aunt, Lor­raine Mary Greene Lee, a fire mar­shal in the sec­ond tower who stayed behind, trag­i­cally it turns out, to make sure every­one had gone. Megan, now 20 and study­ing fash­ion mer­chan­dis­ing, was in fifth grade when the attacks happened.

Her mem­o­ries of that day range from her school class in New Jer­sey slowly emp­ty­ing as par­ents came one by one to col­lect pupils (a mem­ory shared by many Amer­i­can kids); to the awful wait to get news of her aunt’s death; to her grandmother’s heart attack that very day, com­pound­ing the family’s mis­ery (she had surgery and sur­vived.) Greene says the events changed her in many ways, and not just because of her grief.

“That day made me who I am,” says Greene. “It made me grow up. Los­ing some­one made me stronger. It made me never take fam­ily or friends for granted.”

Her world view changed too — dark­ened, per­haps. “When I was 10 I didn’t think the world was a bad place,” she says. “Mom and Dad kept me safe. Now, I second-guess peo­ple more.”

And she treads more cau­tiously — includ­ing on out­ings to nearby New York City.

“When I go there, I never go alone,” she says. “I’d be too ner­vous. I am def­i­nitely afraid of ter­ror­ism. I want to be with peo­ple I know — fam­ily, friends, who could take care of me if some­thing happened.”

Some par­ents say they worry less about their children’s secu­rity and more about the impact of 9/11 on their under­stand­ing — and accep­tance — of other cultures.

“The kids are get­ting an image of the Mus­lim world that I didn’t have grow­ing up,” says Niki Adler, a mother of two in sub­ur­ban Pitts­burgh who works in pub­lic rela­tions at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity. “My job is to coun­ter­act some of that. This is a cul­ture like any­body else’s cul­ture. My kids need to under­stand it better.”

Adler’s older son, Bobby, was only 4 when the attacks hap­pened. “I actu­ally don’t have many mem­o­ries of it,” he tells a reporter. “I was too young to com­pre­hend what was going on.”

But he also believes “it’s the worst thing that’s hap­pened in our mod­ern his­tory,” a sen­ti­ment he shared last year when his eighth grade his­tory teacher asked the class to pri­vately write down their thoughts on 9/11. “I wrote that it must have been really ter­ri­ble for the peo­ple going through it.”

His teacher, Jef­frey Hol­l­i­day, says he first assigned the writ­ing exer­cise to a group of kids just 24 hours after the actual attacks, and he’s given the assign­ment to his middle-schoolers each anniver­sary since. He promises them he won’t look at what they’ve writ­ten until he retires (although as the 10th anniver­sary nears, he is tempted to peek). But he gets a sense of what they think from class dis­cus­sion, and he says the feel­ings and opin­ions among 13-year-olds are as diverse as those of adults.

“We all carry some­thing dif­fer­ent from this,” he says. If there’s any com­mon fac­tor, he notes, it’s a keen atten­tion among kids — espe­cially younger ones — to how the adults in their lives dealt with the event at the time, and how they regard it today.

Schon­feld, the pedi­a­tri­cian who worked with New York kids after the attacks, says par­ents don’t always real­ize that their stress over events like Sept. 11 affects how their chil­dren feel.

“If par­ents have dif­fi­culty cop­ing, their chil­dren do, too,” he says. “The kids don’t even need to know what’s going on” — they’ll feel it anyway.

Which is not to say par­ents are bet­ter off hid­ing their stress or fears.

“If you don’t talk to your chil­dren, you’re more likely to make them anx­ious,” says Schon­feld, who also directs the National Cen­ter for School Cri­sis and Bereave­ment. “If you just tell them that it’s all OK, that’s not gen­uine. Kids need to learn to cope. They can only do that if they see you cop­ing with your own distress.”

The impact of Sept. 11 on fam­i­lies is such a fun­da­men­tal part of the event’s after­math that even the 911Memorial.org web­site has a page of advice called “Talk­ing to your chil­dren about 9/11.”

“Don’t avoid dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions,” it says. “Answer ques­tions about the attacks with facts. … Acknowl­edge that we don’t have all the answers.”

And, of course: “Listen.”

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