When Lisa Marie Lindenshmidt, an administrative assistant at the Muskie school of Public Service, picked up her four-year-old daughter Morgan at daycare on Tuesday, she was prepared to tell her about the morning’s tragedies. Her daughter spoke first.
“I already know what happened today,” Morgan said. “A plane crashed into a building and made a lot of people died (sic).”
For many USM students, one of the hardest aspects of dealing with the national tragedies of the past week was talking about the situation with their young children. Student parents struggled with how much to tell, how much to let children see, and how to process children’s feelings of fear, anger and confusion.
“You have to realize that you can’t isolate children,” said Ira Hymoff, Ph.D., of University Health and Counseling Services. “They’re going to know that something really sad and bad is going on. What’s important is to provide them a safe environment to express their emotions.”
Lindenschmidt and her husband try to speak very openly to Morgan, and they handled this situation no differently. They expressed their own feelings of fear and confusion to their daughter, and allowed Morgan to process her emotions with them.
“This all went down at a very interesting time in Morgan’s development,” said Lindenschmidt. “We had been talking about dealing with anger and why it’s not okay to hit someone or call them a poo-poo head. She knows that people responsible for the crashes made bad choices and that other people are hurting because of it.”
Something that makes this tragedy very difficult for young minds is the barrage of violent images that have been inundating television and newspapers. Hymoff warned against letting young children become overwhelmed by images that they do not have the proper tools to process.
“Don’t have the television on all the time,” he said. “It depends on the child’s ability to process, but images of people jumping from buildings can just be too much.”
Hymoff also stressed the importance of not forcing the topic with children, but being available to talk and waiting for them to express the need.
“Follow their lead,” said Hymoff. “Always ask them if they want to talk before trying to discuss something of this magnitude. Ask open-ended questions with children, like `What do you think about this?’ or `How does this make you feel?”
The attacks also raised powerful feelings in adults that are difficult to explain to young children: anger and vengefulness, insecurity and fear of the unknown. Carelessly venting reactionary feelings around children can further confuse their understanding, said Hymoff.
“Be careful of adult conversations around children,” he said. “Children react to their parents’ expressions of anger. It’s important to recognize these feelings in yourself and your children, and to process and redirect them.”