WHAT SHOULD WE TELL OUR CHILDREN?

As we began to grasp what happened on September 11th, there was a parental outcry of "What shall we tell our children?"
This question was "in the air" and on the air, every time we watched TV or listened to the radio.

Parents felt doubly lost -- not only did they not know what to tell themselves as to how to cope with this shocking event, they didn't know how to communicate with their kids' in the face of this calamity.

So the media got experts who discussed the unusual issue and the consensus was that we need to "be there for our children" -- we need to spend more time with them, talk to them, let them express their feelings and show them that we love them in order to make them feel safe.

Coming to think about it, isn't it what we should be doing always?

The question of "WHAT SHOULD WE TELL OUR CHILDREN?" actually means, "How should we communicate with our children?"
In the contents it was asked, it referred to the tragedy, but it has much broader implications and raises questions, such as:
Do we need an extremely unusual event to wake us up to the fact that we have to talk to our kids?
Do we need a tragedy, in order to communicate with our kids?
How do we "normally" communicate with them?
Do we communicate with them at all in "normal" times?

Communication is the lifeline of our relationship with our kids, verbal and non-verbal.
When our kids are young and can't communicate well with words, we need to "tune" in and listen to their baby-language, watch their body language and decode its meaning.
We need to use all our senses - sight, touch, smell and hearing in order to understand them.
Later on, when the children are capable of verbalizing their thoughts and feelings, we need to talk and listen and at times when they don't feel like talking we again have to decode what we sense.

We should not think that we just "press a button" one day, whenever we feel like it, and make our children talk to us. We need to be there for our kids from day one, communicating our love and care with respect and trust. Then we do not need a magic wand to communicate with them, in the face of horrific events. We simply connect with them the same as we usually do, and they will know without a doubt, the way they should always know, that we are there for them.

Maybe the terrible tragedy had something positive in this respect by being a wake-up
call for us, the parents, to realize our importance in our children's lives and the importance of an on-going communication with them.

Let's hope that with time this heightened awareness will reinforce itself and not fade away.