One of the biggest differences between our lives and the lives of previous generations is that so much can be witnessed through a camera lens.
National and world tragedies are brought into our living rooms as they happen.
In the past, bad news and its accompanying photographs took time to travel and the people involved may well have begun to recover before the news broke elsewhere. Now war is seen in action and children witness events such as soldiers storming buildings and even killing prisoners, as they occur.
In this sense, war has become entertainment. It is the same with natural disasters and acts of terrorism.
The world is still horrified by the Boxing Day images of the tsunami disaster in Asia, while last September we stood still in shock as events in Beslan unfurled. Video footage of Sudan famine victims seems more shocking and painful than in the photographs of previous times.
Traumatised family members are interviewed in states of shock, anger and devastation. We are shown close-ups of homes, bouquets of flowers and wreaths with the camera zooming in on the most touching of tributes.
Real life trauma Children today watch more television than previous generations and many watch in their bedrooms without adult supervision. So, children are often watching real life trauma long before they are able to distinguish fact from fiction.
Most stories for children feature distress, pain and conflict as the main character endures a period of suffering and abuse before achieving their goal. Children can cope with such themes providing the endings are not falsely reassuring or depressing. Children need endings they can use and that work for them.
Wars, terrorism and natural disasters rarely have fairytale endings. So what do we tell the children and how much do we tell them? To what extent should we be raising their awareness of world events and to what extent should we try to sanitise them?
Younger club-aged children will still be living in a fairly egocentric world, meaning they are more concerned with what affects them directly.
Following the floods in Boscastle, we can understand the seven-year-old in Cornwall who stacked his pillows against his bedroom door in case the water came. We are also not surprised that children in other parts of the country may not have attached much relevance to this natural disaster.
Older children tend to absorb not only what is relevant to them but also what they are ready to learn and, like the younger child, may well dismiss the rest.
If a child asks questions about national and world events, we can assume that they want to be told something about them. What we cannot presume is exactly what they are questioning. For example, if a child asks why the Palestinians hate the Israelis, they may be asking for a factual answer about the problems in the Middle East. However, they may also be asking about hating, why one feels hate and how one manages hatred. Children often use questions about the external world as a way of making sense of their feelings, their internal world.
AGE AND EXPERIENCE
Children need to be given information appropriate for their age and life experience. Let us think about an incident discussed in a support group for club leaders working in an area where many of the children in club had parents in the army. They had noticed that the children seemed to take the idea of a parent being posted to Iraq in their stride. This was their parent's job. While some spoke openly about missing their parents, none expressed fears about their parent's safety and many seemed proud of the work their parents were doing.
However, the club leaders noticed that some of these children seemed more boisterous and played more aggressive games than previously. They wondered if children were expressing their anxieties and also trying to play out what might be happening to their parents.
Then the first British soldiers were killed in action and the television showed pictures of the ceremonial return of their bodies. The next day eight-year-old Sam was particularly quiet and withdrawn in club until his playleader found him staring gloomily into space. As she sat down next to him, tears rolled down his cheeks and he whispered, 'Will my daddy be killed?'
What is the most helpful way for this playleader to respond? Some members of the group felt she should reassure the child that his father would return safe and well, as statistically this was the most likely scenario.
Others felt an honest, 'I don't know but I hope not' was the best answer.
Everybody felt the question would be easier to answer if posed by a non-army child as reported by another club leader. An eight-year-old in her group had asked the same question after a news item reported a policeman shot on duty. This child was particularly affected by seeing the policeman's son who was the same age as him. Here it was felt easier to say something like, 'Your daddy is not a policeman and so it is very unlikely.'
However, it may also be important to help the child to be realistic by adding, 'Of course, we will all die some day, but hopefully this won't be for a very long time and not until you are much older.'
For Sam, realism had to be modified to a digestible version such as, 'Some soldiers do get killed in wars but hopefully your daddy will live for a long time yet.'
ASKING QUESTIONS
When children ask questions, it is always worth wondering if the child is speaking on behalf of someone else. Children's attitudes and behaviour are most coloured by the way the adults around them manage their feelings about what is happening. Sam was voicing his own worry, but he was also undoubtedly voicing his mother's worry.
Children are acutely sensitive to adults' emotional states at the best of times. In the worst of times, they turn to adults to help them make sense of their worries. When it comes to national and world disasters, terrorism and wars, this gives us a problem because we are often put in the position of trying to explain to children events like the tsunami or Beslan which we cannot begin to comprehend ourselves. Our bewilderment adds to our distress which children often sense. It is frightening for a child to feel that the adults are themselves distressed and unable to cope.
A playleader recently recounted how she opened a newspaper in front of some children in the after-school club to be faced with moving pictures of starving families in Uganda. She found her eyes filling with tears and was aware that all the children had quietened and were now watching her with slight panic.
Perhaps the most helpful way of managing such a situation is to be unafraid to show sadness, but also to show how you manage it with something like, 'These pictures make me so sad I want to cry. It's all right to be sad...
but maybe we had better get on with what we were doing.' This may give the children a chance to say anything they need to say concerning the pictures but it also conveys that it is not their responsibility to comfort you.
Dismissing your tears, or ignoring children's responses, may give the impression there is something so worrying that it can't be talked about or that you cannot focus on them.
POSITIVE ACTS
From eight years onward, children begin to develop a strong sense of justice and fair play. As they begin to take more interest in the world outside home, they can be real motivators for change in the community. They can have a very prosaic, focused reaction to tragedies and disasters by believing that they can solve the problem by raising money for aid through sponsored events.
In her book, Love, Hate and Reparation, Melanie Klein talks about how we are all frightened of our own aggression and seek to make reparation for it. We can think of these children as unconsciously trying to make something good on behalf of the adults. They may not only increase adults'
awareness of world events, they can even shame us into raising or giving money. They certainly convey to the community as a whole that something can be done in the face of seemingly impossible situations.
I obviously looked startled when two eleven-year-olds recently asked me to pay 5 each for some cup cakes they had made to raise money for Sudanese famine victims. Before I could speak, one of them said (rather witheringly), 'Andrea, they have nothing to eat ...'
Andrea Clifford-Poston is an educational therapist and author of The Secrets of Successful Parenting - Understand What Your Child's Behaviour is Telling You (How-to-Books: 9.99)
