Navigating 9/11’s Anniversary with Young Kids

I was a couple months shy of my eleventh birthday on the day that Islamic terrorists hijacked commercial jets and waged war on American life. Growing up in Virginia Beach, a stone’s throw from Naval Air Station Oceana, I was used to planes — they were loud, powerful, and instruments of protection. And then, like so many other parts of my childhood reality that day, that changed.

Twenty-five years later, I am now somehow a couple of months shy of my 36th birthday with an eleven-year-old of my own and two younger kids.

I found myself wrestling with a question: How much of this do I share?

Conservatives are pretty big on history. We might quibble over whether it repeats itself or rhymes — but we agree that history matters. And thus, we teach it. Normally, I jump in with both feet.

I did so over the summer as we celebrated America’s 250th. Our three elementary-age kids not only sat through but claimed to enjoy an entire documentary on the Revolution that a friend’s film studio premiered with Hillsdale University.

My lifelong enthusiasm for George Washington, Patrick Henry, Lafayette, and the Battle of Yorktown has been indulged (and possibly even shared) by my offspring this year (especially when fireworks were involved).

But not all stories enjoy such cinematic conclusions.

September 11 still hurts. Others fared immensely worse than I did, but it still hurts for me and millions of others who lived through it. While we took many good and necessary steps to unleash fury and recompense against the evildoers, nothing actually rebalances those scales in a cosmic or cathartic sense.

So, I confess to walking on some proverbial eggshells when it comes to navigating 9/11 with my kids.

How much of the tragedy and pathos of that day is too much to share with a girl who can usually be found churning out artwork and caring for an ever-growing menagerie of pets — to say nothing of her younger siblings who traffic in Bluey and Magna-Tiles?

Thankfully, I’m not the only parent or teacher in this outfit. I married a farm girl from North Carolina, and, as with so many questions of life and parenting, while I was weighing the options and overthinking them, she was making moves with her signature practicality and deceptively simple wisdom.

While running errands in the minivan, the subject came up organically. Maybe the kids had seen something earlier on their mom’s phone or noticed the extra American flags around town. In response to their questions, my wife tactfully summed up the day by explaining that bad guys took some planes and crashed them into some important buildings. She told them how she felt when an elderly relative called the landline at the farm and said that America was under attack.

But she also told them about the brave men and women who fought back. The ones who called family members and prayed before ensuring that United 93 would never reach its intended target. The ones who fought fires and evacuated buildings and volunteered their boats to get their countrymen to safety. I don’t know if she told them about their uncle who joined the Marines to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they know he’s been back recently — this time doing ministry among Syrian refugees.

And as we carried out our nightly liturgy of pajamas, toothbrushing, and never-ending drinks of water, I felt a type of peace that I’d been missing this week.

There is no way to insulate any of our kids from the consequences of September 11 — they are still reverberating through daily life. They will experience some of them firsthand when we go through TSA on our first whole-family flight next month.

And they witness subtler consequences too. Like the quiet tears my wife and I wiped away as we scrolled through the gut-wrenching footage from Manhattan or read tributes to the undiluted heroism so many Americans embodied that day.

And maybe that’s the point. The blow of September 11 didn’t land in my kids’ childhood. Thanks be to God. But they perceive that it landed on their parents and their elders. Each of us has been spared the visceral recollection of tragedies that came before our time, and each of us owes something to the ones who persevered, rebuilt, and defied the forces arrayed against liberty and decency in their day.

While anyone who witnessed September 11 can never forget, we can pass on what was preserved. By doing so, we can extend to those who came after us the invitation to remember.