We woke up to the horror of the Boston Marathon bombings yesterday. The free-to-air channels televised a seemingly endless loop of the one piece of footage they could access: the moment when the bombs exploded near the finish line.
I turned to social media in an attempt to find out more detail. Apart from the obligatory start to the conspiracy theories, Twitter and Facebook contained concerned comments from many mothers about their small children seeing this footage unexpectedly.
It is a real concern for parents. My boys were aged seven and four on September 11, 2001. As was typical, the morning after my oldest woke up far too early, took his little brother’s hand and led him quietly downstairs to the TV to watch a favourite morning program. I noticed them slip past my bedroom, hoping I wouldn’t see that they were up.
A couple of minutes later my oldest called out, “mum a plane flew into a building on Sesame Street”. I had been awake for most of the night watching the footage until I was functioning on autopilot. When I opened my eyes in the morning I had forgotten all about the horror – until my son reminded me.
I ran to them quickly and turned the television off. But it was too late. They had already seen too much. A thousand questions were fired at me in quick succession, the worst of which was “is dad in that building”? My husband Graeme, an editor for The Australian, didn’t come home that night. Like many, many journalists around the country he pulled an allnighter. It was, after all, one of the biggest stories in the world’s history.
But back home that footage of planes hitting buildings, then buildings collapsing (yes, they saw that too), combined with their reality that dad wasn’t home, equated to personal fear in our little family. In the midst of the news chaos I had to phone my husband so the boys could hear his voice and know that he wasn’t in that building that collapsed.
One of the reasons tragic news events have a real impact on our children, is the way we react to the event. Back in 2001 I was visibly shaken by it. My children detected my panic and then panicked too. Thankfully my sons are now teenagers because their drama teacher Louise Arnott was on the news last night having run the Boston marathon. She was unharmed but it might have been difficult to explain had they been younger.
The drama of these news events is great for ratings but arguably not so positive for children so parents need to pay special attention to this as the footage from the marathon gets replayed over and over for weeks to come. It took my seven-year-old a decade to feel comfortable with air travel.
How have you managed this with your children?