Children’s Delayed Reactions to September 11

Shortly after the events of September 11, in addition to my private practice in Manhattan working primarily with children, I became a volunteer/consultant at community centers working with children who were directly affected by the collapse of the Twin Towers. When I work with children it is usually in small groups and I employ art and writing projects to help them to express their thoughts and feelings.

The children I work with in the Downtown community centers live in close proximity to Ground Zero. In my private practice the children all live in Uptown. The Uptown children were not personally affected by what happened on September 11, other than that the fathers of two of the children were temporarily without offices and worked at home. The Uptown children acted as though Downtown was in another country and they would not talk about what happened there. Except for one boy. I will call him Corey. Corey, age six, drew a picture of the destruction of the World Trade Center. On a large piece of paper he drew in pencil planes crashing into the Twin Towers and explosions spreading across the page. In a tiny corner of all that violence he drew two small buildings, each with an American flag on top. One building he labeled “Bowling Alley” (he loves to go bowling with his family) and the other he labeled “Studio” (my office). I asked him the mean-

Page 171

ing of the two small buildings and he replied, “They are safe places.”

I hung Corey’s picture on the wall for all the groups in my office to see, hoping that this would encourage group discussion about the events. To my surprise, no comment was made about the picture by the group Corey was in or by any of the children who came to my office. This particularly puzzled me in regard to a newly formed group comprised of six seven-year-old boys, whom I will call Nathan, James, Kevin, Michael, William, and Morris. It was a fragmented group. The group was broken up by sub-groups and one boy, William, was constantly being teased and picked on by his peers. After studying the group resistance, I decided to confront it. I pointed to Corey’s picture. I asked the group why I had not seen similar pictures or heard one word from any individual in the group about what happened on that terrible Tuesday morning. Each of the boys feigned surprised looks as though they didn’t know what I was talking about. Then they began to speak. Here is what they said:

Kevin (angrily): “Who drew that picture?”

Nathan (turning away from the picture): “I don’t know anything about that.”

The others shrugged and gave me “don’t look at me” looks.

Robert Quackenbush (RQ): “What? None of you knows anything about the destruction of the World Trade Center? How can that be? It has been shown on television and pictures of it have been in all the newspapers. You mean to tell me that after all this time has gone by since September 11 you don’t know anything about what happened on that day?”

Except for Nathan, all the boys in the group shook their heads, “No.” Then Nathan spoke up:

Nathan (angrily): “I know about it!”

With that, the other boys also admitted that they had seen pictures of the horror of September 11 on television. Nathan went on to talk about his anger and that day.

Nathan: “We had just gotten to school. In class we were playing ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ Someone came in the room and whispered something to our teacher. Our teacher said we had to go home. No one knew why. My father was working at home that day. When I got there, I asked him what happened. I could tell that he didn’t want to tell me. I kept asking him what happened. He said there was an accident in one of the buildings downtown. I asked, ‘What building?’ He said, ‘Guess.’ I asked, ‘Was it the Empire State Building?’ He said, ‘No.’ I asked, ‘Was it the Chrysler Building?’ He said, ‘Guess again.’ I asked, ‘Was it the Twin Towers?’ He just said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Tell me what happened.’ He said, ‘What do you think?’“

RQ: “Why didn’t your father tell you what happened?”

Nathan: “He did later. But at the first I think he didn’t want to worry me. It was the same at school. I wanted to know what was happening and no one would tell me, like I shouldn’t know. There was no school the next day because some of the teachers lived outside the city and couldn’t get into town. The day after that we went back to school.”

RQ: “Did you learn more about the attack when you returned to school?”

Nathan: “I learned that the husband of a teacher I had last year died at the World Trade Center.”

James (firmly): “That’s not true! No one at our school died at the World Trade Center. Our school was very lucky. If someone had died we would have gotten notices from our school asking us to go to the funeral. We got no such notices.”

Nathan went silent as though he was absorbing what James had said. Then he asked me for paper and a pencil. He set to work drawing. The others in the group asked for drawing materials and clay. They began working on art projects, too. I was impressed by the group’s sudden cooperative behavior as a result of Nathan and James being able to sort out what was true and what was not. Their interchange helped the group to accept that the truth about the frightening events that had been happening in our city was being kept from them.

Some of the boys asked me for art project ideas. I suggested that they create their favorite “safe places” as Corey had done. Kevin made a clay model of a playground in Central Park. Michael drew an army camp with all the necessary, protective weapons. Morris drew a picture of the apartment house where he stayed with his father on weekends (his parents are divorced). William made a clay model of his dog, Barney. James filled the pages of a blank book with pictures of his favorite family holidays including his birthday. Nathan, now free from his anger about the truth being withheld from him, drew a picture of a baseball player

Page 172

(his father plays baseball) hitting a home run in a giant stadium. Proof that the group had become unified came through William, who had previously been rejected by the other boys in the group. Now the other boys were asking him to work with them on their drawing and clay projects. The group resistance of not working cooperatively together was resolved.

I used this experience to encourage “safe place” art projects in my volunteer work Downtown with equally successful results. I suggested that the boys and girls in the community centers make miniature books about their ideas of safe places to be. An eight-year-old girl made a book about the safety of having a close friend and how her friend cheered her up when she was feeling “bad.” A nine-year-old boy made a book about feeling safe with his grandmother and the things he enjoyed in her neighborhood. A seven-year-old boy, who had been unable to speak about the horror he witnessed on September 11, made a book about the destruction of the Twin Towers and what he had seen that day. He drew pictures of people leaping from the towers and firemen and policemen going to their deaths. When he came to the last page he asked to leave the room. When he returned, he was able to make an ending for his book. He drew the Twin Towers whole again.

Thus, six-year-old Corey’s courage to draw the horrible things that were happening around him and to seek places of safety led the way for other children in the city—Uptown and Downtown—to become aware of the things that made them feel secure. The work is ongoing, of course, and there are new resistance issues to be resolved at each of the groups I work with—Uptown and Downtown.

The resistance issues take many forms. In the former fragmented Uptown group, the most recent was a tearful quarrel between James and Nathan over “curse words.” Nathan said he heard James cursing at school that day and he was going to tell James’ mother. James sobbed and said that Nathan was wrong because what he heard was “something else that might have sounded like curse words.” Then Nathan began to cry and said he that he knew what he heard was right. The other boys in the class supported Nathan and said that it was true that James had used “curse words.” This led to my intervention to inquire what curse words meant to the group and why they gave such words so much power to make them cry. Through talking, the boys acknowledged that curse words were powerful because they shocked adults “like the things we hear on television.” Further exploration revealed that to them the power of curse words was like the frightening words they heard from the media about surprise attacks of terrorism. Through the children talking, positive things like this are happening in all the groups I work with. I am convinced that we adults have much to learn from children during these uncertain times.

Page 173