On what I'm not telling my child about the Newtown massacre, and what I might

So last week I had been planning a post for Sunday about our experience volunteering at the Masbia Soup Kitchen on Coney Island Ave., and then Friday came and with it the unbearable news that a disturbed young man armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle and two other guns had entered an elementary school in Newtown Connecticut and killed 26 people, including 20 children, six- and seven-year olds (the same age as my own child).  Like everyone else, I've spent the days since trying not exactly to make sense of this horrific event, because there is no sense, but simply to process it, to adjust to a reality where this has happened.  I've wanted to say something in the context of this blog, because it is about parenting with the purpose of engaging children in the world, and helping them understand their responsibility to others and their power to play a role in creating a better world, a stronger community.  It is also about finding ways for them to practice that role, in partnership with adults.  And here is an event that directly affects children, that cries out for all of our empathy, and our anger, and, beyond this sole instance, has brought suddenly into relief the danger that so many children face on a day to day basis from guns and violence.

But here's the challenge.  I have chosen not to tell my daughter (yet, still) anything about what happened at Newtown.  I've shielded her from the news, I've crossed my fingers that no other child at school will raise it to her, and am thankful that she has no regular exposure to the media.  If she has questions, I'll find a way to answer them, but so far she remains unaware, and for that I am thankful.  When I found myself sobbing intermittently over the weekend, I hid it from her.  I have no idea if this is the right thing to do, but it was the only thing that seemed possible to me, because I had no interest in increasing by one more the number of people traumatized by this young man's acts, because once you know this can happen, you cannot unlearn it.

A few years ago, on Martin Luther King's birthday, we went to do a service project at high school, where we got to paint a mural of Ruby Bridges.  In order to explain the significance of all of this to my daughter, why Martin Luther King was hero, and little Ruby Bridges, too, I had to introduce my then kindergartener to the concepts of racism, hatred and prejudice.  And even though it was towards a higher purpose, it felt horrible.  It was not the lesson I wanted to teach.  This is what faces us if we want to foster that broader empathy, and to engage our kids along side us in addressing injustice, hardship, need, in taking advantage of those opportunities to do good.  Knowing how to do that, and when, seems immensely difficult.  I would love to hear from those of you who have experience doing this, and what you've learned.

There are a lot of good links going around with advice on what to tell your child about what happened, and how to explain traumatic events like this one to children in ways that respond to their fears and their curiosity.  I defer to the experts on that.  But I've been thinking about what I might communicate to a seven-year old if I were going to talk to her about more than just her own safety, and her fears and her sadness.  Here are some things I might say.  The teachers and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School were incredibly brave.  Bravery is everywhere and the capacity for bravery is in everyone, even though you may never notice it.  Sometimes, ordinary people do extraordinary things as if they were ordinary tasks, and we honor that.  We don't yet know everything about why this man committed this horrible act, but we know he must have been very disturbed in his thinking and feeling.  Most people who are sick in this way are not violent and do not harm people, and it is important that we as a community make sure that help and support is available for people who are sick and for their families.

I might also tell her that an event like this might have been prevented if it wasn't so easy to buy guns for which there is no alternative purpose but to commit acts like the one this man committed. And we need to hold our leaders accountable for what they've done and failed to do to make this impossible, and we need to raise our voices to make sure that they are brave enough to do the right thing.   I might want to move on to talk about what it means to see guns everywhere in our weaponized culture and what that does to our ideas of bravery and power, and I would want to situate this issue in a larger discussion about other ways we fail all of our children, but I might just stop there, for now.  Because a seven-year old needs to discover the world and its vast imperfections (as well as its glories) by degrees.

What are you telling your kids, and how are you engaging them in your own responses? 

"Opportunities to Do Good"

A friend called my attention today to an article by Dr. Perri Klass, a pediatrician, in the New York Times' Well column, called Understanding How Children Develop Empathy.  You can find it here.  The column looks at what we know about "how and why we become our better selves," noting that "the capacity to notice the distress of others, and to be moved by it, can be a critical component of what is caused prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others: individuals, groups, or society as a whole."   Empathy, in other words, can be that first step in developing a greater sense of responsibility for the world around you, and, we can hope, the habit of acting on that responsibility - volunteering, sharing what you have with those who have less, voting, signing petitions, starting social movements, etc. etc. etc.

So how do you foster empathy and prosocial behavior?  There are, according to the article, a couple of different theories (and some underlying science) about why people develop the capacity to feel for others, and the desire to help them.  The first is that it feels good to help others, and that we develop habits of charity for the same reasons we may develop other habits, that there is some "neurological reward" triggered that serves as motivation.  The second is that we develop social cognition, a recognition that other people have needs and goals.  The two theories are not mutually exclusive.  Taking this into consideration, the article suggests that we can foster this behavior in children in a few ways.  Parental modeling is important, always.  So is taking the time to explain how other people may feel as the result of another's behavior (e.g. "How do you think he felt when you took the toy?).  The author, and the experts she cites, also suggest that you don't provide actual, material rewards for prosocial behavior, but provide "opportunities to do good - opportunities that the child will see as voluntary."

Opportunities to do good are everywhere, and one of the things I found helpful about this piece is that it reminded me that the smaller, individual opportunities can be as important as the grand ones in terms of the development of a child's sense of connection to the world and her role in it.  If compassion and caring may be habit-forming, then there are many ways to develop that habit.  One of the reasons for starting Raising the Village was the conversations I had with other parents about how difficult it was to engage in volunteering and other community work with kids, because of time constraints, planning challenges, and lack of easy access to activities that permit and welcome children.  I'm hoping we can continue to create and share those larger opportunities to involve kids in the work of our communities. 

But even when those larger opportunities aren't around, or life gets in the way, we do well not to forget or forego the little habits of compassion.  In my house, we've had a lot of commitments lately, and seasonal viruses and, well, the recurring elementary school plague of head lice, so finding the time to practice a bit of meaningful civic engagement has been challenging.  But this evening, we spent the time before dinner writing thank you notes for gifts my daughter received for her birthday.  A slow process with a seven-year old, but it proved to be surprisingly enjoyable for both of us, as we thought about what she could say (and spell) that would communicate to others how much she appreciated each particular gift.  It's a bit ironic, I realize, to bring this up, since my very first post for this blog was entitled "Beyond Please and Thank You."  Still, it helps to remember that a please or thank you, or a chance to set the table or write up the grocery list can be an opportunity to do good.  

So, what opportunities have you've found?  What's worked well, and what hasn't?

Can Kids Speak Truth to Power?

On October 15, Occupy Sandy is planning a day of action to highlight continuing pressing needs more than a month post-hurricane and the need to pay attention to who is directing, benefiting from, and participating in the rebuilding and recovery process.  This has gotten me thinking about kids and political action, particularly activities like demonstrations, rallies and direct action protests.  Anyone who has ever parented or spent oh, say, an hour with a toddler knows that children have a remarkably instinctual understanding of civil disobedience and direct action.  Indeed, I once comforted myself as I struggled with a child gone totally limp on the floor of a place she did not want to leave with the thought that somewhere in her brain she was actually singing "We shall not, we shall not be moved, we shall not, we shall not be moved, like a tree standing by the water, we shall not be moved."   As someone who has been hauled off by the cops on a few occasions for these types of activities back in the day, I was impressed.

Still, thinking about engaging kids in demonstrations and rallies about larger issues than whether the hat stays on the head or not raises a lot of questions.  It's one thing to cart the stroller with you to a demonstration or march when your child is too small to understand, as I did a bunch of times when my daughter was little.  It's like bring the baby into the voting booth, it matters a tiny bit to them, a lot more to us.  There's also using the little one in a state of nature as part of the protest, like the Great Nurse-In, or in a favorite story of mine, retold in one of Studs Terkel's oral histories, about how a group of mothers in Chicago got a meeting with a high official who was ignoring them by bringing their children into his outer office, giving them candy apples, and letting them loose.  I guess one might have ethical issues with this tactic, but I think it's genius.

 Once they're older and ask questions, though, how do you engage them authentically around issues that may be fairly complex, as most are?  (If you think this isn't controversial, by the way, check out the vitriol in the Amazon comments section around this book, That's Not Fair! A Teacher's Guide to Activism with Young Children, and see what flips your stomach does when you look at this coloring book).   Last year, we went to an Occupy Wall Street event, and then went to a protest about the millionaire's tax and public education funding in front of Governor Cuomo's Manhattan office.  On the one hand, this was an issue, funding for public education, that is directly relevant to younger, school-aged kids and that they at various levels, can get.  Still, try explaining graduated taxation to a six-year old.  Also, what a governor is.  And a millionaire.  I did try, and she carried a sign and chanted and made me proud, and perhaps a little uneasy.

In this spirit, I've been doing some digging on resources for parents who are thinking about this - if you've got 'em, share 'em.  I like this article, from the website Compassionate Kids, which provides some practical nuts and bolts advice on activism with kids, starting with "Park legally" (there's also a good piece on volunteering with kids here).  Also found this list of issue-oriented activities for kids on a home-schooling site - there are a number of resources for this broader category of social action, particularly for middle school to high school age youth, fewer on the demonstrative side and fewer for younger kids.  Here and here are a few stories about other parents and activism.  Looking for more.....

In the mean time, what do you think?

Thanksgiving Chicken

This evening I asked my 7-year old what she had learned about Thanksgiving in school.  "Nothing really," she said, uninterested, "just that we have the day off."  So there I was, with an opportunity: what to teach the kid about Thanksgiving, when, surprisingly, I was faced with a blank slate.

Frankly, the blank slate piece really did throw me.  When I went to public elementary school on the upper west side of Manhattan in the 1970s (the old, oddball, somewhat grungy, pre-"You've Got Mail" Upper West Side), Thanksgiving meant cutting tall feathers out of construction paper and stapling them to oaktag strips to make head dresses, and fashioning pilgrim hats out of black cardboard.  We got a bit about Squanto, we got the pictures of long wooden tables laden with food, surrounded by happy diners seated Indian-Pilgrim-Indian-Pilgrim as if they had consulted some early American Emily Post.  The story was a happy one, a celebration of collaboration across cultures, of everyone bringing something to the table, of that potent American myth of simultaneous diversity of origin and unity of purpose, and, ultimately, abundance for all.  I'm not sure I understood all of that in the second grade, but that story was foundational to my education about American history.

That I cringe at this right now is an understatement.   Still, as myths go, it's easy to see the attraction of this one.  Particularly now as a parent interested in how we teach kids kids about the value of community and collaboration, I like the idea of finding examples from history, simple and close by, which make that point.  Even better if they involve building relationships by cooking and sharing food.  But the story as it was told to me (and generations of school children) is wrong on so many levels (historical accuracy being foremost) that it doesn't surprise me that four years into public education my daughter has no associations with this holiday except no school and turkey.

Every year, though, we celebrate this national holiday and have an opportunity to explain, invent, or re-invent what it means.  So my question is this: what are you telling your children about Thanksgiving?  Do you give up the early European settlers and native tribes altogether and start with Lincoln, who, in the midst of the Civil War, proclaimed the modern holiday as a national day of giving thanks to god?  Do you try a more updated version of the story of the holiday's early origins as a harvest festival, and enrich the myth with more accurate details, including more of the perspective of the native peoples, and the violence perpetrated on them by the settlers and those that followed?  Or highlight aspects of the story that seem relevant or valuable and simply stay silent on the rest?   Or, do you bring out your copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and debunk the myth from the beginning?  And then sit down to your big family meal (pass the stuffing, please).

Holidays tend to bring out the worst of my ambivalence about fully opting into or out of the larger narratives of a particular cultural or religious tradition, and I worry about how this translates to a child.  My inclination is to duck the question, but I'm fighting it.  What about you?

Meanwhile we are going to go do some volunteering on Weds. night, helping to cook Thanksgiving Dinner at the Ascension Church (see the info on the Bulletin Board).  Maybe I will have figured something out by then.