The 9/11 Generation — Children and Families Five Years Later
By David Surface
Social Work Today
Vol. 6 No. 5 P. 26

Children of P. S. 234, once in the shadow of the World Trade Towers, rarely talk about 9/11 anymore. Memories of the kindness of individuals and communities in the aftermath may live with these children longer than fear and anxiety about the attacks.

“Children are not little adults ready to live in an adult world,” wrote Angelo Patri, the innovative educator. They live in a world of their own. But what happens when that childhood world is ruptured by something terrible that has no precedent and no explanation?

Five years after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, people are beginning to ask how children who lived through that time have been affected. And although there have been government surveys conducted to measure the effects of 9/11, that kind of research can never capture the truest, deepest experience of the children and families who lived through one of the darkest chapters of American history.

Is there, in fact, a “9/11 generation”? Do children and parents who lived through that time at close range view the world differently than the rest of us? How do they view those events now after five years? Has it affected the way they see current events in the world? And how has it affected the way they see their friends, their family, and themselves?

School As Home — And a School Without a Home
For the families who lived near the World Trade Towers in Lower Manhattan, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were only the beginning of many long months of displacement and readjustment. For these children and their parents, it was the schools that provided a vital sense of continuity and community.

One such school was P. S. 234. Located only a few blocks from Ground Zero, the World Trade Towers loomed over the school and were clearly visible every day as parents took their kids to and from classes. After the attacks, the school was shut down while the Board of Education scrambled to find a temporary location for the displaced students. Meanwhile, parents and children spent days and weeks in limbo, wondering what the future would hold while trying to make sense of what had just happened. Jennie Cohen, who had an 8-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son at 234, recalls that time of waiting.

“My kids were out of school for a week or maybe more, so we went out to our house in the country,” says Cohen. “It was upsetting because you couldn’t get away from the news. My daughter was very quiet, but my son made a lot of remarks. He’s a very intense kid. He’d say things like, ‘Mommy, I know why the bad man leader did what he did—because he really believes in something.’”

Cohen, who also had a 6-month-old daughter at the time, recalls her son asking what his baby sister could see. “I thought he meant how babies see in black and white or something, and I said, ‘They see everything that you see’, and he said, ‘No they don’t, Mommy—they don’t see people jumping out of buildings and burning.’”

Finally, after more than two weeks of waiting, the students of P. S. 234 and their parents were told to report to P. S. 41 on West 11th Street. Patti Delgado, a parent whose children were aged 9 and 6 at the time, recalls that day:

“To get to the school, we had to walk through the gates in this big chain link fence and pass through the schoolyard,” recalls Delgado. “We all gathered in that schoolyard early in the morning. I remember lots of hugging and kissing and crying because people hadn’t seen each other in over two weeks and didn’t know where each other were. There was a lot of crying but a lot of happiness to see each other. It was scary but warm and loving at the same time.”

The entire population of two schools crowded into one building, creating a host of new difficulties. The noise level was deafening. Space was hard to come by, with 80 or 90 students sometimes packed into a single spare room. Elizabeth Keim, a first grade teacher at 234, says that the close relationships that already existed between teachers, children, and parents did a lot to ease the stress of the relocation.

“We’re a ‘looping school,’ which means I’d had the same group of kids before as kindergartners,” explains Keim. “So even though it was only the fourth day of school, I already had this relationship with the kids and their parents. A lot of moms and dads followed us around that day. Given the situation, you didn’t say no to those parents.”

For many young children, being alone became a new source of anxiety. “My kids really stayed close to me and sort of followed me around,” says Delgado. “Whatever grown-up or authority figure said anything to them, they would just follow it. I think they were really scared.” Delgado’s 6-year-old son was particularly affected. “Until fourth grade or later, my son would not leave his teacher’s side,” says Delgado. “He wouldn’t go to lunch, he wouldn’t go to recess or art class or computer class unless he was with an adult that he trusted.”

Creating a Safe Haven
Two weeks after being relocated to P. S. 41, the students and teachers of 234 were relocated again, this time to a site that was to play a significant role in rebuilding their sense of community.

St. Bernard’s was an old vacant Catholic school located on West 13th Street. Once a beautiful building with varnished wood floors, double-height windows, and exquisite wooden cabinetry, St. Bernard’s had fallen into disrepair. The bathrooms didn’t work, the cafeteria was filthy, and the old staircases that wound up the building’s three floors were steep, dark, and foreboding. Undaunted, parents and teachers banded together to make this unwelcoming place into a warm and inviting home for their school.

“The parents were the workforce,” recalls Delgado. “We cleaned, washed windows, washed blackboards. We redid it in a week. That school was so beautiful by the time we finished.”

Businesses and artists from the community joined in to help transform the old school. A shipment of beautiful, child-friendly wooden furniture appeared overnight. A design company created murals of fruit on the cafeteria walls and stenciled footprints in different colors going up and down the old dark steps to make them seem friendlier. Delgado recalls one final touch that really made the building seem like home. “The design company took school photos of all the kids and painted them and blew them up, so all the way up the staircase there were portraits of all the students. The kids would walk up the stairs and see their faces. It was wonderful.”

Bruce Arnold, PhD, a psychologist at P. S. 234, remembers the transformation of St. Bernard’s as a key moment in the school community’s healing. “I think that St. Bernard’s was incredibly positive. In the theory of trauma recovery and disaster recovery, this was like the honeymoon phase because everybody was helping,” he says. “The boundaries between school and community and parents just merged.” Arnold points out another benefit of parents pitching in to remake the building: “There were groups of parents working in the school all day long, so the kids could see parents. That was important for them.”

Still, the new location had its drawbacks. “The playground was not good,” says Arnold. “It was across the street and was exposed. Being outside was hard for the kids. Planes would fly over and some of our kids would get anxious.”

“We had a big issue with noise,” Delgado agrees. “If an airplane came over, we’d all be traumatized. And, of course, the kids would express it indirectly as well—the clinginess, the nightmares, separation issues.”

Meanwhile, whether to expose their children to news coverage of the attacks and other world events continued to be a big issue for many parents. “I kept my kids away from the TV, but there was a ton of discussion going on among them,” says Delgado. “Some parents let their kids watch everything. Afghanistan was a major part of the discussion, the bombing, people being killed. There was a lot of discussion among the kids about those things.”

In the Spotlight
Students dislocated because of 9/11 also had the surreal experience of changing from consumers of news media to the actual subjects of media attention. For the first time in their life, these children were no longer merely watching the news—they were the news. Requests for interviews flooded in from around the world, reporters and camera crews became a common sight near school grounds. Because school officials recognized that they could not completely insulate the students from media attention, they chose to exercise control over the kind and amount of attention to which they would allow the students to be exposed.

“We were very selective about media things that we chose to participate in,” says Arnold. “We chose projects that we felt would help the kids. The kids really wanted to talk about their experiences and what they learned. They wanted to thank people who’d sent them things. Older kids wanted to talk about why this thing happened, how they understood it.”

In addition to the media attention, the children displaced by 9/11 received a whole different kind of attention that was also new to them—being the recipients of gifts and donations from people all around the world. Delgado kept track of all the gifts that came flooding into the school. “We got beautiful artwork, quilts, and things. I decorated the school with it. It was this very warm, lively, beautiful, comforting environment.”

Still, the neverending flood of good will became overwhelming, sometimes because of its sheer quantity, sometimes because of the kinds of things people sent. “We got too much stuff,” Delgado admits. “There was a news story where some kid from 234 was quoted as saying that he’d lost his Legos, so kids went to their toy chests and pulled out their Legos and sent them in little boxes—we got thousands and thousands of Legos.”

“People sent American flags they’d knitted out of beads,” remembers Cohen. “It was too much. We went through it all, took what we needed, and gave the rest away.”

Among all the material the schools received were some things teachers thought were inappropriate to share with the students. “There were a lot of condolence letters,” remembers Delgado. “A lot of stuff like, ‘We’re sorry your parents died.... We’re sorry the plane crashed and made you scared....’ There was also a lot of religious stuff we ended up censoring.”

Other adults, like Keim, worried about how the constant flood of donations may affect how the children saw themselves. “There were people going through their old Legos and giving them to us. The kids would ask, ‘Why are we getting this?’ I didn’t want to tell them, ‘It’s because we went through this terrible thing, because people all over the world are worried about you.’ I didn’t want that kind of spotlight on them, so I just said, ‘It’s because people are thinking about you.’ I didn’t want them to feel dependent on others. I didn’t want them to see themselves as victims because they weren’t victims—they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Two years after the attacks, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene approached P. S. 234 with a survey they’d designed to measure the effect of 9/11 on the students. The school refused to participate.

“They wanted to figure out what percentage of kids were symptomatic, which ones qualified as having traumatic stress disorder, that kind of thing,” says Arnold. “We looked over the survey and decided we didn’t want any part of it. People felt like this was going backwards, that it was not helping them in terms of getting past this and they didn’t want their kids exposed to it. There was a real strong commitment to protecting the kids.”

Five Years Later: Lessons Learned
One year after 9/11, the students and faculty of 234 initiated a “Give Back” program. “We were having lots of conversations about how people had given us so many things, had given of their time, and how we wanted to recognize that by giving back,” explains Keim. “The older kids looked at it more through the angle of philanthropy. For the younger kids, it was a little trickier to make it clear what we were talking about. Making the world a better place was how we framed it for them, so the little kids made flower boxes for the neighborhood. In the end, every student either raised some money or made something that they gave to someone else. I think they learned that there’s something bigger out there, that people respond to people in crisis and try to help them.”

Today, five years after 9/11, the children who lived through it still speak of it, but not as often as they once might have. “The way I hear about 9/11 is usually when kids are going through some particularly stressful time in their lives, talking about it in counseling, sharing a dream or nightmare,” says Arnold. “In school, it’s a thing that’ll happen from time to time in lunch conversation. Otherwise, people don’t like talking about it.”

Perhaps one of the most telling examples of what children have done with their memories of 9/11 is the P. S. 234 school yearbook that just came out this June. “I was looking through the new fifth grade yearbook where the kids write a little autobiographical note,” says Arnold. “Out of 90 kids or so, I counted five or six references to 9/11—maybe a mention, a sentence or two. The rest of the kids said nothing. I thought it was interesting that when they were thinking about their entire elementary school experience, there were only five who said anything about 9/11. I would have expected more kids to say something. But I think that’s just part of the way some people recover.”

So what, if anything, have these children learned from what they went through on 9/11 and its aftermath?

“Kids said they learned how important their school was to them,” says Arnold. “School was really a therapeutic thing for them. We had kids say they never realized how important it was to have a friend, that they never realized how important their family was. Kids also said they’d learned what it takes to get through something that’s very hard, and how important it was to help other people.”

“My daughter learned that there’s a lot of suffering in the world and it upsets her to no end,” says Cohen. “Both my kids definitely learned about politics, which I would have chosen to have them learn later in life. Also, that governments sometimes don’t necessarily represent what you want, or what people want, and that it’s out of their control. My son learned to be afraid. He carries it around with him. He went to therapists and did a lot of work. He’s getting older and better about it, but he still carries it around with him.”

Three years after 9/11, Cohen’s son (then the age of 8) wrote the following poem in school:

The worst thing that could happen to me is that a building could fall on me.

The worst thing that could happen is my Dad would forget to bring home coffee ice cream.

The worst thing that could happen to me is I could die.

“He knows that, and it’s just going to stay with him,” says Cohen. “He doesn’t talk about it all the time, but it’s just the way it is. I wouldn’t have thought like that at his age.”

Still, Cohen speaks fondly of her children’s new school, P. S. 3, and how being politically aware and involved has helped her family deal with the darker side of what they’ve been through. “The other thing my kids have learned is the kindness and goodness of people. P. S. 3 is so involved in the world.” Cohen’s children now take part in fund-raisers to help build a school for children in Afghanistan. “Afghanistan has [remained] a major part of their lives,” says Cohen. “They know they can help, and they like that a lot.”

Delgado speaks of how 9/11 has affected her son’s political-moral sense. “My older son, who’s this incredibly bright and articulate young man, is now very connected to the world and social issues. It’s so ingrained in him. He’s very responsive to things he hears on the news. He gets very angry about things, like what’s going on right now in Israel and Lebanon. He feels that it’s morally wrong what families and children are going through, and he’s kind of outraged by that.”

Is there such a thing as a “9/11 generation,” different from any other before or after it? Delgado believes so. “I’ve told my kids, ‘You’ve witnessed history’ and they agree with that. Their life was different before 9/11. I told them that I remember vividly as a child when John Kennedy was shot—they’ve asked me to tell that story many times because he was a hero to them. And I say, ‘Now you, too, have your story to tell. You have something that shaped your life.’ I think it has shaped their life in the sense that my kids have seen something really horrible and they got through it. I think they are stronger for it. It’s made them very thoughtful and has strengthened them in an interesting way. They can say to themselves, ‘You know what? I can see the worst of things and I can get through it.’”

— David Surface is a freelance writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY.