When a child asks, ‘What does it mean?’

Colleen Atkeson’s 7-year-old son, Nicholas, first noticed the signs sprouting from the yards of their Mar Vista neighborhood several months ago, and it didn’t take long for him to start asking questions. “Why does that sign say ‘No War,’ Mommy?” “What do they mean when they say ‘Stop Bush’?” “What does it mean, ‘War Is Not the Solution’ ”?

Atkeson, an attorney and mother of three, took a deep breath and checked her conscience and her internal parenting guidebook. Keep it simple, keep it respectful and keep it a world away, she thought.

“It’s not a black-and-white situation,” said Atkeson, “and I want my kids to reach a solution after a reasoning process.... And I want them to respect a position other people reach, even if it may be different than theirs.”

Atkeson plunged into a pint-sized rendition of a debate that has gripped the nation’s adults: The leader of a country far away might have weapons that he could use to hurt a lot of people. Some people think these weapons need to be taken from him by sending our army over there to fight. Others, including these people with signs in their yards, she added, believe there might be other ways to take those weapons away.

And then she held her breath for the fearful questions she hoped wouldn’t come. Nicholas sat back, satisfied.

“Anxious about his personal security?” Atkeson said with a laugh. “No, he was thinking about who was going to be his play date that afternoon.”

For parents like Atkeson, these are tricky times. Kids are going to ask, and amid the swirl of debate, charges and countercharges, the transparencies and satellite photos, it’s hard enough to explain the facts of the case. It’s even harder to explain them without giving your child a case of wartime jitters.

“Kids will personalize the war as the adults around them will, and they will take their cues from them,” says Richard Lieberman, a school psychologist and crisis coordinator in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Parents’ preoccupation with stressful news events -- or their ability to absorb them and move on -- are key in helping a child decide whether the world is a safe or scary place, Lieberman says. “The kids are watching, and they see and hear so much more than we sometimes believe, so don’t forget.”

But while we steady ourselves for our children’s inevitable questions, Lieberman says, remember: It can become, as they say in his business, “a teachable moment.”

The key to seizing on that moment without planting the seeds of worry may lie in the conversations parents have with their children long before the U.N. Security Council votes or the tanks roll.

“Everything starts with the premise that kids’ questions are legitimate and that you have to deal with them at the time,” says University of South Carolina psychologist Frederick Medway. “That really means you have to make time. And you have to establish these communications patterns early.” If kids feel comfortable asking their parents anything, then they will return again and again with their concerns.

And while we’re being honest, just how much of the frightening detail do you want to place in front of your child?

Experts note that although honesty is the best policy with kids, parents’ truth-telling should be geared -- in its language, its details and its extent -- to the age and emotional maturity of their child. And it’s best to wait for a child to raise a question, to answer it without going beyond the inquiry, and then, like Atkeson, to prepare either for more questions or for the reassured silence that follows.

“There’s an age-appropriate level of honesty,” says Eleanor Holcombe, a Washington, D.C.-area mother of three. “What I would tell my 16-year-old and my 8-year-old, I would layer it in different ways. But if they ask me, I’m going to tell them, because you’ve got to learn to handle it.”

Differences in age

School psychologist Steve Brock notes that, especially with younger children -- preschoolers and those in the early primary grades -- “how you say it is perhaps just as important as what you say.” These children look first to their parents and other important adults in their lives -- teachers, grandparents and caregivers -- and gauge their reactions before deciding how scared they should be. If they see worry and fear in adults’ faces and speech, they are likely to become worried and afraid. But if routine reigns and reassurances come with a smile, most little ones will relegate thoughts of war to a faraway place.

Brock, who trains school psychologists at Cal State Sacramento, warns that in deciding how much to tell their children, parents should consider not only the basic nature of the child -- is she a worrier or an easygoing optimist? -- but what kinds of stresses the child has weathered in the recent past. Has a marital breakup or parent’s job loss jolted his world? Has a loved one or even a pet been hurt or lost? Has she witnessed a violent act or had nightmares after watching explicit news coverage?

“These kinds of things do have a cumulative effect,” says Brock, who adds that such children may need an extra dose of reassurance and answers that are a bit less detailed. If they want more information, let them ask. And while some kids will want to talk about it, others will demonstrate their stress by withdrawing, avoiding the subject, fighting or resuming childish behavior they seemed to have outgrown.

‘Tweeners -- kids roughly between 9 and 13 -- may have special ways of expressing their worry, according to Medway of the University of South Carolina. These kids, in particular, may look to quell their fears by asking extremely technical, sometimes grisly questions that may not seem related to war -- “quasi-scientific questions that represent these kids’ struggle to understand life and what it’s all about,” Medway says.

In the wake of Princess Diana’s death, these were the kids who he would hear ask questions about the top speed of a limousine and how the impact of a concrete wall could crumple the front of such a large car. Medway says these kids may ask their parents questions about missile ranges, where Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein went to college and how you could poison a large body of water with germs. Take each question as it comes, Medway advises, and try not to assume you know what’s on their mind. They will ask what they need to know.

Teenagers are a different challenge for parents. Psychologists say these kids are protected from anxiety over matters like war by two factors: their greater independent reasoning ability and their complete preoccupation with their friends, school and social lives.

For the most part, those can be good things -- these kids recognize the distance at which a war would be conducted and might know enough from news reports and their experience to conclude that their personal safety is unlikely to be threatened. And besides that, they sometimes can be preoccupied with an upcoming social event or school deadline.

Rumor mill on overtime

The dark side of this adolescent coping strategy is that kids in groups are notorious purveyors of distorted and often frightening information. So when kids rely on one another for news of the world or, worse, for reassurance, they are likely to come home with some wild rumors and downright scary misinformation. For the naturally nervous among them, this can become a source of real worry.

“I find one of my most frequent jobs is to correct information they’re bringing into the classroom,” says James McGrath Morris, a teacher of high school seniors in West Springfield, Va. But for the teacher with the time and latitude to teach kids about world events, the prospect of another American-led war is a great teaching opportunity.

“They are jumping at the chance to talk about it in class because they want to get things cleared up,” Morris says. “They’re asking the kinds of questions that thrill teachers.”

That, in turn, creates a broad opening for the parent who looks at her tight-lipped older child and wonders whether it is war or just hormones that makes him so anxious or withdrawn.

Frank Zenere, a school psychologist and crisis counselor with the Miami-Dade school system, suggests that a game of hoops might loosen a teen’s tongue. Or, if the child is old enough, some shared time in front of a reliable national newscast. But Morris says that sometimes your teen is more primed to talk than you guess.

“Parents should be aware that most teachers are discussing this in class,” Morris says, and should take advantage of that information. When they ask their high school student, “How was school today,” they don’t have to take a silent shrug for an answer. “This may be a moment for them to connect with their kids.”

While each child is different when it comes to facing the worry of war, there are certain groups of kids -- children of military personnel, for instance -- for whom stressful situations such as separation from parents and fear for their safety are a regular feature of life.

Don’t assume that children become hardened to such sources of stress, experts warn: On the contrary, parents of such kids should be more watchful than most. For that reason, schools and community-support offices offer a wide range of counseling for military parents and kids, and emphasize the importance of maintaining routines and keeping lines of communication open between parents and children.

In some areas of the country, the shared experiences of children may also make an outbreak of anxiety more likely among groups of kids. In New York City and the Washington, D.C., area -- sites of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, that is a special concern.

Eleanor and Monty Holcombe moved to Springfield, Va., four years ago, and it seems fear has haunted their neighborhood since.

The terrorist attacks claimed the lives of one Holcombe child’s Sunday school teacher and the parent of a child up the street. The Muslim family two doors down kept the kids home from school for a week for fear of retaliation. Then, in rapid succession, came the scares of anthrax-tainted mail, the random, sniper-style shootings that kept Washington-area school kids in “lock-down” for almost three weeks, and more terrorist threats -- with government-issued advisories about stocking food, water, duct tape and plastic sheeting.

And now comes the prospect of a U.S.-led war in Iraq. It is an operation that has already drawn in many of the Holcombes’ military friends and neighbors.

And it is certain to rivet Coast Guard Lt. Monty Holcombe’s attention on matters of safety and security close to the nation’s shores.

But with fear again stalking the neighborhood, Eleanor Holcombe is determined to keep this unwanted visitor from creeping into her three children’s lives.

“We can’t live our lives in fear, I tell them,” she says. “But if they take the initiative to ask me, I’m always going to be as honest as I can” -- about the prospect of attacks on Americans, about the likelihood their dad could be drawn in, about the certainty of people dying on both sides. And that means acknowledging her worries and moral uncertainties about a likely war.

And then, she’ll drive them to choir practice.