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?
