Disaster

Yesterday while driving with the boys in the car I was listening to NPR as they were recounting statistics and information about the disaster in Japan. Kyan has started picking up words here and there from the radio and he asks questions that I can't answer. I knew better than to leave the radio on, but it was on when I got in the car and I got sucked in and didn't turn it off right away. He picked up the words, "killed" and "wave" and began asking difficult questions.
"Mommy, did a wave kill someone?" "Mommy, is it a wave like Daddy rides on his surfboard?"
"Mommy who got killed?"

I wasn't prepared to discuss the disaster with him and though I considered trying to on a simple scale, I decided against it. I diverted his questions with some lie about fishermen who were catching fish in the waves and then killed the fish to eat them...what can I say, sometimes I have to lie for his own good.

It got me thinking, though...When are they old enough to know what is going on in the world around them. I pondered that and decided that, for now at least, I am glad that my smart little boy lives in a bubble where the world is safe and happy and good. I worry that if he learns too early of the instability, the war, the natural threats, and the inherent evil that exists in the world then he will learn to fear rather than to act.

I am afraid. I am scared to death of the stories coming out of Japan right now. The nuclear threat alone is mind blowing and though I am many miles from Japan and my boys are mostly safe from that particular threat, I think of all of the children of Japan and their mothers and fathers who are living a nightmare right now. There is nothing at all that they can do to protect their children from this disaster; there was nothing they could do to protect them from the earthquake or the tsunami. How on earth could I explain that to my son?

Someday he will have to learn about the world at large and all of its flaws and dangers. I know that. Yet there is nothing more precious than childhood and I will not take that childhood away from him. Not yet, at least.

He asks me constantly why I don't like guns and other weapons and why I don't like him to check out books that have violence in them. I try to explain that guns kill people and weapons hurt people and that I don't like that. He is already smart enough to come back at me with the fact that guns and weapons also kill animals so that we can eat them. I still stand strong that weapons are not toys, so we do not use them as toys. I wonder all the time if I am just deepening his obsession with weapons by resisting what everyone tells me is his natural impulse to want to play at violence. When he comes into the room holding two guns that he has, quite creatively, fashioned from Legos, I am at a loss. I scold him for it without even thinking and then when he sulks off I begin to wonder if my response is appropriate.

Short of sitting him down and educating him about the consequences of violence, the casualties of war, children bringing guns to school, people killing one another on the streets over a pair of shoes, etc. which I am not about to do with a 3 year old, no matter how bright he is, I have no real way to impress upon him the gravity of enacting violence for play.

Someday he will see other kids playing video games where people kill one another with guns and he will probably even pick up the controls (at someone else's house) and laugh and joke while he, too, kills imaginary people and watches the blood fly. He will not play these games at home, but I am aware that I cannot shelter him from the world forever, so how do I prepare him to meet these grim realities with grace?

It is completely beyond my understanding that these games even exist, let alone that people allow children to play them. How and when did death and violence become a game that we market to children? I can understand, to some degree, the argument that children should be introduced to guns at some point so that they are not ignorant of the realities and/or so that they have a working knowledge of them and a respect for their power. I hear that argument from my father in law and my husband all the time, and though I can't entirely accept it, I can see where they are coming from. How, though, can we make any argument for the existence of these games that make our children squeal with glee to see blood fly from their victims and body parts explode into pieces around them? Maybe those who allow their children to play such games believe that children can differentiate imagination from reality, but I would counter that the rising cases of violence among children tell us otherwise.

It all goes back to the original question: When do we begin to educate our children about the difficult things in life? It has to be early enough to allow them to make intelligent decisions about the media and the "play" that they will be introduced to when they are outside of our influence, but not so soon that the bubble of childhood is breached before they are ready for such exposure. I wish I could say that I can clearly see when that should be. I can't. I hope that one day I will just know that they are ready. I hope that I will make intelligent decisions about when to tell them about the 10,000 + lives lost because the ground shook and a wave came or about the fact that we power our society with toxic materials that can kill us all if we lose control of them. I want my sons to be intelligent beings who fight for our environment and our human decency when the time comes, but I also want them to be children that still believe in their parents' power to keep them safe. Once again, it comes back to walking the line and hoping like hell that I don't lose my balance.