A Nation’s Children Forge a Shared Memory

After the World Trade Center attack, the two dozen preschoolers at a UC Berkeley child-care center invented a new sandbox game of search and rescue. Some of the 4-year-olds are saviors. Some are the saved. Some of the children bend at the waist and sway.

They are the fire.

On Sept. 11, thousands of children lost family members and friends; millions more lost a sense of security that until then had seemed a national birthright. What they share now is an insistent memory of planes and towers and fire and billows of dust. A generation raised on Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket is confronting genuine moral conflict, far starker than the storybook good and evil.

The shock of the shared experience may mold this generation’s bedrock beliefs and behavior, according to neuroscientists, historians and psychologists.

“This is the intersection of one’s own development and history,” said University of Michigan psychologist Abigail Stewart.

Researchers who have sifted the lives of Americans who came of age during harrowing times say today’s children may become more concerned with family, more attuned to the calling of community, and more involved in the world beyond their immediate horizons. They may also be less self-reliant, more anxious and more inclined, perhaps, to see a threat in an innocent gesture.

In the months since the attacks, many children have shown remarkable resilience, psychologists say.

But the shock of suicide hijackers and lethal anthrax attacks temporarily turned some children into anxious daydreamers--distracted, disorganized and forgetful.

A growing body of research shows that when children are repeatedly subjected to fear and danger, the emotions chemically affect their brains, leaving patterns that can linger for a lifetime.

Until now, this newest generation-in-the-making had never been threatened with the sustained privation of war or national economic hardship.

“This burst the bubble,” said Cornell University medical sociologist Elaine Wethington, who studies psychological turning points.

The early effects can be seen in places such as Utah Elementary School in Los Angeles. There Carlos Santiago, 8, sketches the burning towers and the dead in vivid Crayola hues of firetruck red and orange, even as he denies any memory of the Sept. 11 attack.

He presses down hard on the paper with each stroke: An American flag burns. Two planes race toward each building.

Two stick figures are falling headfirst to the ground. An ambulance and police car wait at the bottom. Two more stick figures look up.

“My family don’t talk about it now,” Carlos said. “They don’t want to talk about it. Now I feel happy because I am not remembering about that.”

Influences of Difficult Times

For almost 70 years, sociologists such as Glen Elder at the University of North Carolina have studied how the disruptive sweep of history has affected generations of California children.

For the Depression-era children of Oakland, he and his colleagues found that the influences of economic hardship and war were profound, affecting everything from the age at which they married to their susceptibility to illness in middle age.

Boys who grew up in families distressed financially by the Depression, for example, were less likely to change jobs or learn new fields as adults.

“The younger the child, the more disruptive and damaging the changes were,” Elder said.

Unemployment and shame fractured their families, even as they gave many children their first sense of adult responsibility. World War II ravaged their ranks, yet gave the survivors unexpected confidence, social mobility and sense of authority.

So, too, for today’s generation of children--changing times may mean changing values, Elder said.

“The loss of people and symbols very dear to us led to some questioning of ourselves. We are in a different world today,” he said. “Even though some of the old habits are returning, we will never be quite the same.”

Among today’s children, awareness of an external threat and new responsibilities may make public service more appealing and community more important, he said.

The generation now coming of age may find a larger purpose in life than PlayStation 2 or Britney Spears.

Not all the effects, however, are likely to be so uplifting. When University of Kansas historian William Tuttle, author of “Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children,” asked that generation how the conflict affected their childhood, the results surprised him.

He expected to hear of shared sacrifice and patriotic fervor. But, in interviews with 2,500 people who grew up during that war, he heard instead about nightmares, family crises and prejudice.

“What struck a lot of these kids was fathers crying for the first time, mothers becoming extremely agitated,” Tuttle said.

For James Marten, a Civil War scholar at Marquette University in Milwaukee, the events of this fall call to mind how the nation’s most severe domestic conflict fascinated children in the North and the South.

The mass media of the Civil War era--public oratory, penny broadsheets, panoramas and illustrated news weeklies--were full of war news. Children were spellbound.

Much entertainment, especially songs, concerned the war. War games and toys were everywhere. Family loyalties often were divided.

“It came to dominate every part of their lives. Boys and girls every morning would get the newspapers and see where the armies were,” said Marten, author of a landmark study called “The Children’s Civil War.”

The war revealed itself even when parents tried to shield children from published casualty lists and other grim war news.

Ruth Huntington Sessions, a Vermont woman who was 6 years old when the Civil War ended in 1865, wrote in a memoir that the war “made itself felt” even to the youngest “from the words and looks of those about us; there was some struggle going on in the world which touched all life, brooded in faces, came out in phrases and exclamations and pitiful sights.”

So often, children are listening closely when parents think no one can overhear, easily grasping matters their elders consider beyond their years.

“They are watching us,” said child development expert Jane P. Perry, who runs the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center at UC Berkeley, a research lab that doubles as a preschool. “They are on the alert to the change of habits . . . to measure the extent of the impact on their safety. They are keenly aware of their helplessness in the world of adults.”

Dawn Robinson, a stay-at-home mother of three, was sure her children had, for the most part, moved on to other things.

On a recent afternoon, she sat on a bench at a skate park in Hermosa Beach and watched her two oldest--Joe, 10, and Sam, 8--perform skateboard stunts.

When the boys got hungry in between moves, she offered them cheddar crackers and juice.

When asked, Sam started talking volubly about the attacks. Every detail was vivid in his mind.

His mother interrupted: “The whole idea of war and terrorism . . . they don’t understand the concept.”

But Sam kept talking avidly.

“I’m just wondering where the terrorists came from,” he said. “Like are they English? Now, we’re just bombing all over the place to see if terrorists are there, and I don’t think that’s fair because they might bomb innocent people’s homes.”

Then, he explained that recently in class he was asked to propose themes to write about, based on the topic “gifts to the world.”

Sam proposed his three wishes: no pollution, no killing nature and no terrorists.

His mother looked startled, then proud. “He knows more than I thought.”

Too Close to History for Comfort

Trouble is something people move to cul-de-sac towns like Castaic to avoid. Here on the ribbon edge of the Golden State Freeway, history is supposed to be that stuff receding in the world’s rearview mirror. But history today is overtaking everyone.

Sitting on a cold bench at an outdoor meeting of Boy Scout Troop 583 at a Castaic ranch earlier this month, 12-year-old Henry Armstrong was gamely trying to make sense of the world.

“First it was Sept. 11, then it was the anthrax, then Afghanistan and now the problems in Jerusalem. It’s all so confusing,” Henry said.

In the Armstrong house, history is an uninvited guest.

Henry and his 11-year-old brother Schuyler complain that their father watches the news all the time and talks about it with their mother constantly.

“My dad keeps yap, yap, yappin’ about it,” Schuyler said. “I can’t get used to it.”

In the Cold War, the suburban home became a shelter from the uncertainty of the age, just as the fallout shelter that resembled it was protection from nuclear attack itself.

Once again, threats intrude. As school trips were canceled and air travel dropped 25%, millions of people stayed home, seeking security in the cocoon of family.

Children who were already spending more time with their parents than children 20 years ago are kept even closer to home.

Their days are more structured. Free time has dwindled, according to field surveys by University of Michigan researchers.

There are new curfews. Parents worry about flying. And about anthrax; they arm their families with prescriptions for antibiotics.

“Cipro is our fallout shelter,” said cultural historian Elaine Tyler May of the University of Minnesota, who studied the effect of the Cold War on America’s families.

“The idea that the unimaginable is now possible is very much the way people felt in the Cold War.”

In Riverside, 11-year-old Dave Lannon-Gunn says the Sept. 11 terror seemed like something that could only happen in big cities far away.

The anthrax attacks, by contrast, felt immediately threatening.

“I’m always looking out for white powder,” he said. “Always picking through my food to make sure it’s cooked well. I trust my mom, but better safe than sorry.”

Thirteen-year-old Josue Oropeza was so unnerved by the attacks in New York and Washington that he refused to leave home at night for three months.

“I feel terrified. I feel more safe and secure with my family,” he said. “It could happen any time, anywhere that attracts a lot of people.”

Josue lives in Fontana, a former steel town 50 miles east of Los Angeles.

His mother, Elva Oropeza, worries that terrorists could strike government buildings even in an out-of-the-way town such as hers.

Oropeza was reluctant to allow any of her four children out after dark for months after Sept. 11.

In early December, the stay-at-home mother relented and took her then-restless kids to Ontario Mills shopping center.

“It’s the first time our family has come out for fun [since the attacks],” Josue said. He seemed overwhelmed by the blaring rock music and pulsing neon lights as he entered GameWorks, a huge video arcade at the mall.

Asked why his family waited so long to venture out, Josue said, “Shock, I guess.”

In Denver, 13-year-old Rachel Loeb says that she doesn’t follow the news on Afghanistan or the global war on terrorism, and she sees only a remote possibility of anthrax or other trouble striking anywhere near her Colorado home.

“As long as I know I’m around safe people, I know I’m in a good environment. Then I feel pretty safe and I’m not that scared of anything,” the young tennis player said.

Still, she was disconcerted last month when the metallic glitter on her new blue jeans triggered the security alarms at Denver International Airport.

Security guards asked her to take off her shoes and socks, then to roll down the top of her pants.

“It got uncomfortable,” Rachel recalled. “It’s not like I’m carrying a bomb or anything.”

Strong Reaction From the Body

Children are especially vulnerable to the riptides of neural chemistry unleashed by fear, alarm and other powerful emotions.

Danger can flood their systems with adrenalin and other biochemicals.

If that response is repeated too often, the brain centers that control the body’s alarm responses may go into permanent overdrive.

In the throes of acute distress, children become hypervigilant. They constantly look for any sign of danger. They startle easily and overreact.

It can take at least six months to distinguish between a temporary reaction to serious trauma and the persistent fearfulness that underlies long-term stress disorders.

The shared emotion of a national tragedy can cause such medical problems even among those far from the scene of disaster.

Television can reinforce the effect, said Kansas State University psychologist John P. Murray, who studies how the brain handles video images of violence.

In part, children’s vulnerability is due to the nature of childhood and growth. A child’s brain has twice as many neurons and is twice as energetic as an adult brain.

As the brain matures, the intricate skeins of synapses are pruned at a rate of thousands per second--cutting off unnecessary linkages.

Under the guiding influence of hormones and other neural chemicals that respond to the experiences of a child’s life, the mature brain takes shape.

Prolonged tension and threats can affect those growth patterns in subtle ways. “It can literally influence the way your brain organizes itself,” said Dr. Bruce Perry at Houston’s Child Trauma Academy. No one is sure just how. Every brain is unique.

Moreover, young people process emotions more intensely and more indiscriminately than adults, according to brain scanning studies conducted by researchers at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Mass.

Often, the growing brain assimilates new experiences through play, as psychologists and generations of parents have observed. Simple games of make-believe become a way to make sense of the world, including how to cope with its perils.

At the Berkeley preschool, Jane Perry said, that is how the students digested the new normality of terrorist attacks, suicide airline hijackings and anthrax letters--so far with remarkable aplomb.

In the preschoolers’ sandbox dramas, danger and deliverance became an overriding theme after Sept. 11, Perry said.

Games of lost and found became improvised sagas of search and rescue. Themes of death and rebirth, always a favorite topic, took on the flavor of the terrorist attacks.

Perry said that the terrorist attacks quickly mixed in with the smaller frights and sadnesses of the growing years.

For her preschoolers, the terrorist attacks were all “something that happened in the same way that we had a huge thunderstorm the other day.

That was equally as powerful an event for them. There were some kids who confused it, who thought it was the same flashing in the sky they had seen on TV,” she said. “That’s how people treat events. They squash them together. Memories get compressed into one.”

A Disturbing First Memory

There will be children whose first lasting memory is a vivid glimpse of collapsing twin towers.

Psychologists call it a flashbulb memory. It is formed in an instant of profound emotion, when a cataclysmic event burns itself into memory with all the indelible detail of a photograph.

So many people remember exactly where they were, how they felt, what they saw.

In a way that no scientist fully understands, this kind of memory is where the private life of the mind and the public world of a nation are one, said Harvard University neuroscientist Daniel Schacter.

In years to come, the memory of this autumn will unite these children, transform them and, in turn, will itself be transformed.

Everyone’s response to that September moment--like everyone’s individual recollection of it--is unique. Yet memory is a script continually rewritten by subsequent events, by the stories shaped from them, and by the chemistry through which they are stored and retrieved.

As people share their recollections of the moment, they are altering each other’s memories of the event, unconsciously drawing the different visions closer together until all these millions of intensely personal memories start to blend into a single shared national moment, said psychologist William Hirst at the New School University in New York.

He is leading a consortium of six universities studying what the human brain will make of Sept. 11 in the years to come.

“This kind of memory serves as a joining point of our private and public life,” Hirst said. “Our identity--collectively and individually--is wrapped up in our memories.”

Eventually, they may become the touchstone for a generation.

A Jumble of Worries

“First it was Sept. 11, then it was anthrax, then Afghanistan and now the problems in Jerusalem. It’s all so so confusing.”

Henry Armstrong, 12-year-old Boy Scout from Castaic

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“I’m always looking out for white powder. Always picking through my food to make sure it’s cooked well. I trust my mom, but better safe than sorry.”

Dave Lannon-Gunn, 11-year-old from Riverside.

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“Cipro is our fallout shelter. The idea that the unimaginable is now possible is very much the way people felt in the Cold War.”

Elaine Tyler May, cultural historian at the University of Minnesota

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“The loss of people and symbols very dear to us led to some questioning of ourselves. We are in a different world today.”

Glen Elder, sociologist at the University of North Carolina.

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Staff writers Erika Hayasaki and David Pierson and researchers Edith Stanley in Atlanta and John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.