Our children are asking questions. A 10-year-old: "If you were a pilot and your plane was hijacked would you fly into a building?" A nine-year old: "I'm afraid to tell you this, Mum, it's too terrible to say. A woman rang her husband from the plane on her mobile, and told him she was going to die."

My eldest wanted to know: "Are our uncles okay?" She has three in Manhattan and one in Washington DC. Thank God, they are all well. And while one was so close to the Pentagon that he saw the plane hit the building, he is well.

Protect our children from what they are hearing? We cannot protect them.

As Paul Gilligan, psychologist and chief executive with the ISPCC says: "Ordinarily you can try to protect your children from seeing things on TV, but this has a global impact and you cannot protect them." If your children aren't watching at home, their friends are. They're all talking about it in the schoolyard.

So what we parents are dealing with now is not just a matter of limiting media exposure, handling media messages, or offering acceptable "spin". We can only resort to honesty. Each of us, in our own way, needs to be deeply in tune with our children. We need to talk to them at an age-appropriate level about what has happened, Gilligan says. And I agree: We need to answer their questions directly. We cannot change what has happened or coat it in sugar.

My four-year-old was in his Montessori school when he saw people hanging from the building, then falling from the windows. Now, he looks up in the sky. Out of the blue, he stares out the window and says he wants to see heaven.

"How do you get to heaven? Do you have to be invited?" my six-year-old asks. You have an open invitation, I tell her.

Gilligan advises: "A four-year-old needs to hear: 'This is a terrible thing that has happened in a city in the US. People who were very angry drove a plane into buildings and killed lots of other people'." Children of this age are adept at knowing how much they can handle and won't be staring at the TV for hours. They'll avoid it.

An 11-year-old needs to have the question, "Why?" answered. They need to understand that people who were angry for political reasons did a terrible and wrong thing. We need to be led by their questions, and let them talk openly about their fears.

Fifteen and 16-year-olds are capable of a full understanding of the events. They need to talk. Sitting in front of the TV as a family and watching the horrible scenes, and talking about them, would be a wise move, Gilligan believes.

We need to be careful, though. Over the next few weeks, it isn't necessary for our children to continually see the full, graphic horror. So far the media have been fairly restrained. The most traumatic coverage - in terms of the human cost - is probably yet to come.

The only harm parents can do in this situation is to refuse to talk about the tragedy. If children believe it is all a secret, then they will suspect that there are far worse things we are not telling them, he warns. And they will be afraid to voice their fears - because children hate to upset their parents.

"Are we going to have World War III?" my daughter asked. I reassured her, as best I could, telling her that we would be safe. I was just glad that she wasn't afraid to ask the question.

Some people say that the death of childhood comes when the child realises that the parent is no longer in control of the world. We need to show our ability to cope with this situation.

We are all in shock, but we need to model coping behaviour for our children, just as we would with a death in the family. And for many Irish families, there will be deaths in the immediate family as a result of these heinous acts.

Because while we, as parents, may fear that our safe world has gone, our children don't need to know this. Not yet.