Out of the mouths of babes and siblings

One of our little girls has very big eyes, with eyelashes that curl halfway up to her eyebrows. They are beautiful eyes, but being on the receiving end of one of her penetrating looks is quite unnerving. The other day I was eyeballed. "Mammy, who are the goodies and who are the baddies in this war?"

I took a breath, opened my mouth and shut it again. Saddam as a baddie was easy enough, but how much of my own ambivalence regarding the US and British action should I explain?

Then inspiration struck. Use psychologist Marie Murray's suggested technique. Marie, God bless her, in one of the best pieces of parenting advice around, often counsels checking out what the child thinks or knows about a subject before launching into detailed explanations. It has dug me out of many a hole in the past. So I asked my daughter,

"What do you think, love?" There was a wriggle of four-year-old shoulders, the beginnings of a stamp of a little foot and a deep sigh. "Mammy, if I knew, I wouldn't be asking you. So who are the goodies and the baddies?" Alas, not even Marie Murray is infallible.

In the first few days this little one was constantly checking that Iraq was very far away, and that the war was not happening in our country.

Very quickly, the adult news junkies in the house had to curtail their TV viewing, to the extent that I usually watch TV news after the children have gone to bed, because the images are just too distressing. Even words caught from radio news bulletins, like "explosion" and "bombing", will cause her to frown and ask questions. She is most upset when a report mentions children.

As a result, I am acting like a censor in my own household. Experience has taught me that children process information very differently from adults.

This same child provided me with a vivid illustration of that fact. When she was only about 2½, I was carrying her in my arms, taking her to visit the grave of her grandmother, who had died a few months before.

She seemed to be still distressed about the grave, and asking why Grandma was down there. So I reassured her that this was only Grandma's body, which she did not need any more, and that Grandma was in heaven, and able to look after all of us in a different way.

She seemed somewhat comforted, but later she said to me in a confidential tone."Grandma doesn't need her body in heaven. She only needs her head to talk."

With a major effort I kept my face straight, and with the vision of Grandma's detached head dancing in my mind, attempted to explain what I really meant.

We can never be quite sure what way things are being received, or what pictures our well-meant words conjure up. I know that when children are apparently unconcerned they can be also be affected. Like most parents, I struggle to reassure our children that they are safe and secure, and that while bad things can happen, the world is basically a good place.

Sometimes I resent bitterly the fact that children are presented with so much more information than they can cope with, particularly by the electronic media. Not that I think that as adults we are immune to the ill-effects of saturation coverage of death and destruction. My sense is that there is a predictable cycle of initial dismay, followed by desensitisation, followed by apathy.

Joshua Meyrowitz, author of No Sense of Place, is particularly interesting about the effects of electronic media on children, and he stresses that it is not just the dubious material which has an impact on them.

He says that in the past the adult world had a certain degree of mystery and that children were gradually initiated into its secrets.

Children often gained information by fading into the background and overhearing scraps of adult conversation, which they then pieced together, sometimes with the aid of friends and siblings.

There was a very clear division between what children and adults knew. Meyrowitz is not suggesting it was automatically right to keep children in the dark, but just that adult knowledge came gradually to the child.

The advent of television has changed all of that. Significant adults in a child's life no longer set the pace of information gain. Instead, parents often struggle to help children integrate knowledge which they have gained through the electronic window.

Once you have a television in the house, trying to give information to children in an age-appropriate way becomes a lost cause. In the past few years, it seems, every couple of months bring some fresh horror to our screens. Childhood innocence is battered over and over again.

Banning television is no answer, though sometimes I wish I could. Children still hear from classmates what is going on. After September 11th, playing at being firemen became briefly very popular in Irish school playgrounds. Not that playing out distressing scenarios is necessarily bad, unless it is done in a very violent or obsessive way, which of course is a warning sign which should not be ignored.

Quite often, children come to terms with events through play. Those of us who did not want our children to have toy guns may have been wrong. The opportunity to play at war, to act out aggressive impulses in a safe way, may eventually result not in violent monsters, but in gentle people who know the limits to hostile behaviour.

So what did I tell my child? I told her that Saddam Hussein was a very bad man, who had hurt lots of people in a country which is very far away, and that the American government thought the best way to deal with him was to fight him and make him go away from Iraq.

Some people, like her Mammy and Daddy, thought that the fighting was not a good idea, and that there were other things which could have been done. We could still do good things, like sending money to help children in Iraq. She seemed to accept this. At least I hope she did. I can't help remembering Grandma's head.