Talking about 9/11 with my Kids

Living in a world that is wrought with so much pain, hurt, debauchery, hate, violence, racism, rights for all, and so on is becoming so complicated to raise kids in. As a mom, I often contemplate how to raise my kids and what the "right way" is. In this day and age, there is so much to figure out and think about. Everyone has an opinion on the wrong way to raise a child and how many right ways there are. But when it comes to soft, tender hearts that our children have, I often wonder how many mistakes I'll make. Many, many, many, I'm sure. But the main thing is that we do our best, right?

Today, as we mark the 14th anniversary of 9/11, a day many of us will never forget, I turned on a "We Remember" video, compiled of significant moments of that day. My children gathered around me while I played it and they had questions. How do you explain the horror of that day to such young hearts? Death isn't something they have much of concept of yet, let alone thousands of lives affected, lost and hurt. As we watched the plane crash into the second building, I was able to explain to my son (who is fascinated with planes) how men's hearts are full of "naughty" things and how they hurt people because they don't love Jesus. We have talked about how, when we love Jesus, we do good things for people, even if they don't love Him. But when our hearts are selfish (like stealing toys from our siblings, or hitting people because we don't like what they did to us), we hurt others with our actions. I explained that these big, grown men don't love Jesus, but how they just wanted to bully others and hurt them. I tried to convert all these grown up things into situations/examples they could understand.

By the time the video was done, my son was quiet and looked at me and said, "Mommy, I wanna do good things. I want to bring big smiley faces to people. Hurting people isn't good." I think he understood. He then told me we should pray for bad men to bring smiley faces instead. I haven't quite touched on the subject of death with him yet. I don't know how to approach that quite yet. But we'll get there...someday.

There are so many things in today's world that we are going to have to confront someday, and we can only take it one step at a time, pray and ask God to guide us and do our best.