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CNN Sunday Morning

How Do You Explain September 11 Attacks to Your Children?

Aired September 23, 2001 - 08:32   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Many rescuers here in New York City calling the former site of the World Trade Center simply the ruins at this point. It is now day 12, but 11 days since anyone has been pulled out alive.

CNN's Michael Okwu down near the site, with us again this morning on a Sunday morning. Michael, good morning to you.

MICHAEL OKWU, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Bill. Firefighters recovered the body of one of their own yesterday. Mayor Giuliani said that he was touched at how the firefighters stood to attention at the site of his body and how gingerly they treated his remains.

He has called the work of the rescue efforts here sad and magnificent. Some more than 2,000 rescue workers continue to sift the rubble, led by metal workers who cut through the twisted steel and iron and by firefighters and police officers, many of whom are accompanied by dogs who often wear boots to protect their feet.

6,333 people are still missing and presumed dead. We are told that that number might be lowered in the coming days, but a number that will of course unlikely be lowered, and that's 261, the number of dead bodies that have been recovered.

They have carted off some 90,937 tons of debris on 6,255 truckloads. It has been a massive undertaking. No one has been recovered here, as you mentioned Bill, since September 12th, which of course was the day after the attack.

Mayor Giuliani has said that the date is fast approaching when the experts will say no one can possibly still be alive. Bill.

HEMMER: And, Michael, quickly here, we saw some rain at the beginning of the weekend, but it's been beautiful yesterday. Beautiful again today. How has that changed the operation? Can you get a measure of that?

OKWU: It changes the operation but, you know, anyway you look at it, it's just bad news. It's funny, when I stand here I always think of this city as being a city in contrast right now. It is a beautiful, beautiful sunny Sunday morning here in New York, and yet that's bad news for the rescue workers, because it's going to get to be about 80 degrees today, and they say that there are still fires raging deep within.

It is very hot down there, and as I mentioned before, they often have to wear boots. There's one rescue workers who told me that the rubber soles on his boots literally, if you stand on the site for too long, start to melt. And when it rains, it simply makes all the material that they are lifting out of there that much more heavy, and it tends to disperse the smoke a little bit.

It is very difficult and treacherous conditions for these rescue workers. And as you can tell, Mayor Giuliani sends his heart out to them. Bill.

HEMMER: And the workers -- 100,000 tons of rubble removed so far. Michael, thank you. We'll check back in a bit later this morning. Michael Okwu, down here in Manhattan.

Those horrifying television images of those two planes crashing into the World Trade Center, leaving indelible impressions on everyone, including the kids.

CNN's Elina Fuhrman now, and their point of view.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELINA FUHRMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These images, these children at Trinity School in Atlanta will never forget.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: I mean, I watched the news, and I saw the planes crashing, and the Trade Centers collapsing. We saw a lot of firefighters trying to put out the fire.

FUHRMAN: The shocking images everywhere. Children can hardly fail to see them.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Two buildings -- when they got, when the plane crashed, they like smashed together and a lot of people got hurt and some people had to jump out the windows.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: I think about it while I'm writing in my journal, and at home in bed at night, and at lunchtime. Basically, all day.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Why would people do these things to America? I don't get it.

FUHRMAN: Kids everywhere asking questions, forcing adults to grope for answers. Answers that may be beyond reach.

BECKY COOLAGE, PARENT: Why would someone fly an airplane into a building? And, you know, I just took him, you know, that there are evil people in the world.

FUHRMAN: Surveys conducted in the aftermath of the tragedy show that adults have been haunted by the vivid images of the plane crashes shown repeatedly on television. For children, television is pure entertainment, so when news appears on the same screen, they do not necessarily understand the difference, or do they?

NADINE KASLOFF, CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST: Children do understand that it's real, in part because it's the same images over and over again. But more importantly, because their family is watching these images.

FUHRMAN: Psychologists say one way to keep the disturbing images out of children's minds is to keep them busy, drawing or writing letters. The writing and drawing provides a way for the children to cope with the reality of horror that's not going away.

KASLOFF: These children are going to grow up, if not faster, then differently. They're going to grow up with those images indelibly imprinted in their minds.

FUHRMAN: Just as their grandparents, who filled this school for a family event, will never forget World War II, these youngsters will always remember where they were when a war against something called terrorism began.

NADINE GOLD, GRANDMOTHER: These children have had a very, very protected life, even people going into their 20's. They've never really experienced the horror of war and the sacrifices that it takes, and this is grow up time for all of them.

FUHRMAN: You can hear that in the words of this nine-year-old.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Somebody else is probably never going to kill that many people again, unless in a war.

FUHRMAN: This school is stressing the need to pull together, being better helpers, talking about patriotism, about love of country, and being guardians of its future.

Elina Fuhrman, CNN, Atlanta.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HEMMER: Let's continue our discussion and so many of the questions you heard in Elina's story. Dr. Joyce Brothers, known as America's counselor, is with us this morning live in New York City. Nice to see you.

DR. JOYCE BROTHERS, PSYCHOLOGIST: Good morning, Bill.

HEMMER: I ran into a rather precocious eight-year-old earlier in the week and I said, do you know what happened? And she said, yeah, they flew the planes into the building. I said, do you know why? She said, yeah, the buildings fell because they weren't strong enough.

Where do we begin?

BROTHERS: We begin -- I'm out of step with some psychologists. I think that for a child of four or three, we begin with, you are safe. These were bad men. They died. It's over. I don't think that we have a right to change their childhood and make them frightened.

And even older children, four, five, six, seven -- below the age of eight, it is not very real to them. Children below the age of six do not have the concept that dead is dead. They think that people will come back, which is one of the reasons we don't say that they've gone to sleep, because it makes children afraid to go to sleep.

But I think for little tiny ones, all they really want to know is, am I safe. And for bigger ones, also, what they want to know is, am I safe. They may talk about the images and they may draw the images, and they are -- the more they do that, the less it has an emotional context.

But for almost every child, they're having bad dreams. And one of the things parents can do is to say draw your dream. It doesn't necessarily mean that the drawing will have much meaning, but very often even four-year-olds will draw two buildings with a plane, and...

HEMMER: It's interesting you say that. Our executive producer, Ted Fine (ph) in Atlanta, his child drew exactly that, the buildings as they stood with a rainbow in the sky. What's to explain that?

BROTHERS: Oh, he's -- the child -- how old is the child?

HEMMER: Ted, how old is -- three-and-a-half, is his son.

BROTHERS: Three-and-a-half.

HEMMER: Yeah. And what's his name?

BROTHERS: That's a very bright child.

HEMMER: Noah? Noah.

BROTHERS: Noah is extremely bright, because he's doing automatically what all of us should be doing, and that is reprogramming our dreams, with the rainbow. It's going to come out all right. And that's wonderful.

I gave a speech sometime back at John J. (ph) and looked at some of the things that police are doing, because -- over all the years, because they deal with trauma and traumatic events day after day after day. It's their life. And they have a procedure, and everybody can use that procedure.

They collect the mementos, the newspaper articles, the TV stories, and their clothing, and they write out what has happened. Now, a child can't necessarily do that, but they can dictate it to you, their version of it, and then they can -- you can ask them to draw their dream, and it won't necessarily be meaningful to you, but you use it as a jumping off point to say to the child, you know, what is, what is happening here? How do you feel about this? And really what they want to know, am I safe.

And so I think for little ones you can say the bad men are dead, it's over. And the president is going to keep us safe and we're going to punish the bad men.

HEMMER: Take us a little bit down the road. What's the lingering impact of this? The lingering effect? Possibly a greater understand in a few months time, or -- what do you forecast normally when something like this hits?

BROTHERS: For some children, they will be just fine, because they're going over the images over and over again, and because they're closer to their -- to the others in the school. You may find some children who are disruptive that have never been disruptive before, but they're acting out.

You're going to find some children regressing, where before they were toiled trained, now they're back wetting beds. They'll go back in time. But little by little, they'll get better. But children, even under the age of seven, can experience post-traumatic stress disorder. So, we look to see if their grades or dropping. We look to see if they're getting into more fights than usual -- a kid who isn't a fighter. We look to see if they're having difficulty concentrating, and if those things are happening, then we seek psychological help.

But for most of us, what we're experiencing is real grief and it will go away little by little by little. But if it gets worse, then you go for help.

HEMMER: In the 30 seconds we have left, some amazing numbers came out from the Pew Research Center last week that just really surprised. Seven in ten Americans, they found, suffer from depression. These were adults now, not kids. One in three have trouble sleeping. 50 percent have a tough time concentrating. I know we're talking about the kids, but adults are impacted too.

BROTHERS: Oh, that is -- that is grief, and it only becomes post-traumatic stress disorder a little later on, if it gets worse or if it lasts more than about three months. So, for those people, know that they're experiencing -- they would be abnormal, because we have -- if they weren't experiencing this. This is normal behavior in abnormal times.

HEMMER: And quickly, they just gave us a bit more time, but earlier in the week, down now the site that we call it, the ruins, as it's referred to, speaking with a lot of the rescue workers, some of them were a bit angry when I would come up to them and ask them a couple of questions, simply because they felt that uptown, the north end of the island of Manhattan, same part of the world here, same city, they were upset because people were out eating in restaurants, etcetera, drinking in bars. And they did not feel that that behavior was necessarily the right approach. It is true, though, that everybody deals with it in their own way and that way is different for everyone.

BROTHERS: The sooner we can get back to normal life, even for the people who are so heroic that they're giving up their lives or destroying their health trying to help others, the sooner we get back to normal behavior, the better off we are. So, it isn't a terrible thing, if you go to a baseball game. Just don't make important decisions, stressful decisions, right now. But try, for your kid's sake, too, to make everything as normal as possible. Bedtime is the same time, homework is done, stories are read to you at night, but not scary stories, just comforting stories.

HEMMER: One final thought on kids here, when they see the images of an airplane going into a building like that, it probably plays over in their minds, constantly, like it does for adults. Do you see a difficulty for getting children back on airplanes after something like this? And if so, how do you do it?

BROTHERS: Only if parents don't want to go back on an airplane. They take their cute from what parents are doing. So, if parents go back and say, this is what we're going to do, and they are comfortable and not scared, then the child will just go along and say, you know, we're back to normal now. The bad men are gone, they're dead.

HEMMER: Yeah, and the perception is so true, when you hand it down from the parents to the kids. Thanks for sharing. Much appreciated, OK? Dr. Joyce Brothers, live here in New York. Many thanks.

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