The preschooler was busy re-enacting what he’d witnessed that September morning, using toy planes and pretend buildings. His mother assumed he was too young to understand people had died that day.
Yet in recounting his experience, he mentioned some men he’d seen. "What happened to them?" he was asked.
"They’re dead," he said.
Parents and mental health experts have long assumed that witnessing a disaster has less emotional impact on little children because they are too young to comprehend it. An ongoing study of New York City children who were 5 or younger when they witnessed the 9/11 attacks has proved that false.
Preschoolers notice more, understand more and feel more than grown-ups realize, it found. In a poignant role-reversal, what appears to be youthful ignorance may actually be children "playing dumb" to protect the feelings of their parents.
"I think we really underestimate how much young children take in," said Tovah Klein, of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development, one of the study’s authors. "We tend to overlook the emotional needs of young children."
Her researchers interviewed 180 preschoolers and their parents nine to 12 months after the attacks. None of the children lost a parent in the attacks, but all lived near the World Trade Center and had either seen, heard, felt or smelled its destruction.
Their findings, just released, are the latest to emerge from a look at this unique group of children.
The researchers are tracking down 85 of those children who were videotaped in the wake of the attacks to see how they are faring now.
The research turned up a strong link between how upset the parent was and how upset the child was likely to become. Fourteen percent of the children were diagnosed as having the preschool version of post traumatic stress disorder.
It also showed a link between the likelihood of PTSD and the degree to which the event triggered tension between the parents or caused them to be irritable or distracted in their parenting.
"If parents are really coming undone, the child will pick up on that. They look to their parents to get information about the world around them. They look to them for that safety net," she said.
The study rings true for Tammy Rosenthal, who helped run Healing Hands, a Family Service of Morris County arts therapy group for children who had lost a parent that day. Funded by the United Way, Red Cross and private donors in the wake of the tragedy, it ran for six years. Its oldest participants just went off to college.
These children were different from those in the Barnard study — they hadn’t witnessed the attacks that killed their parents — but were also quite young. The oldest was 8 or 9, Rosenthal said.
How well the children absorbed and adjusted to their loss reflected how their parent — usually the mother — was coping.
"The key thing was how depressed or withdrawn the mom was," Rosenthal said.
At the close of one of their early art sessions, the children, on their own, raced to the blackboard and drew the towers being hit by planes.
"They’d say, ‘This is where Daddy died. This is where he worked,’ " she said. "There was a tremendous need to do this with both boys and girls. I didn’t prevent them, because they were mastering the trauma. It helped them absorb it. You can kind of work it into your brain," she said.
In very young children, post-traumatic stress shows up in sleep problems, aggressiveness, separation difficulties, reverting to babyish behaviors and developing new fears. (One arts therapy project was decorating a personal night light.)
Unlike adults with PTSD, who typically become withdrawn and avoid others, children become clingier. "A parent leaves the room and they become hysterical. They become vigilant," Klein said.
Perhaps one reason the emotional impact on preschoolers has been underestimated is their tendency to display uncharacteristic calm during a true crisis, Klein said. Parents in her study told of boisterous, wiggly 3-year-olds turning eerily quiet and obedient as they and their parents fled Lower Manhattan that day.
"The mothers said things like, ‘I wrapped his stroller in wet towels and he just went along with it,’" Klein said. "The kids totally got it."
Some attributed that to a state of shock, but Klein believes it shows the children were drawing accurate conclusions about the seriousness of the disaster from how upset their parents were.
Since many preschools had not yet opened that morning, many of the children were still in the company of their parents. Yet when the Barnard researchers asked detailed questions about what the families had experienced that day, parents gave different answers for themselves versus their children. "They’d say, ‘I saw people who were injured — but my child didn’t.’ Or ‘I saw people who jumped — but my child didn’t,’ " Klein said.
The parents may have believed their children didn’t notice or understand those incidents, Klein said, "but that doesn’t mean they didn’t see it."
Klein told of a child who revealed to researchers that his friend’s father had been killed that day. When researchers relayed this to his mother, the woman began crying and said, "I didn’t know he knew that."
"Parents don’t want their children’s childhood taken away. But at the same time, children pick up on the emotional climate. They realize their parents are signalling, ‘You don’t know this. You didn’t see this,’ " she said.
Yet even small children realize that bringing up these events will upset Mom or Dad, so it goes unmentioned. Said Klein, "The child really does protect the parent."
