For Some Children, It's Worse Than A Nightmare
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 2, 1991
NEW YORK, Friday: A perky announcer looked up at the camera during a children's war special on American television last weekend, and in her best campfire ghost-story voice said an Iraqi Government official who had criticised President Saddam Hussein "was later cut up and sent in a plastic bag to his wife".
Considering the program was supposed to reassure children about their safety, it was to say the least, a weird choice of words.
A television critic said the story "frightened the bejabbers out of lots of kids" and that it was a moment equal to when a CNN reporter screamed "gas"during a report from Saudi Arabia and made a leap for his mask.
The problem for parents, schools and television stations is: what should children be told about war and what happens when their imagination takes over
The newspaper USA Today has started a telephone hotline to answer their questions and in an editorial today said "kids need help to weed out fiction from fact".
"Four-year-olds imagine their home will be bombed," it said.
"Seven-year-olds may imagine their water is poisoned. And many kids may think that because Saddam Hussein is an Arab and Muslim, all Arabs and Muslims are enemies, despite millions of Arabs and Muslims opposing him."
The problem of children's reactions has been complicated by instant television coverage of the war and bomb-by-bomb descriptions of air-raids.
At the same time, it is the first conflict in which American women have been sent to the warfront in large numbers and the first time so many children have been left alone because mothers or both parents are on active duty.
Of all wings of the defence forces, the US Army has the most women among its enlisted ranks with 82,000 or 11 per cent. Of those, 16 per cent are single mothers. About 53,000 soldiers, or 7 per cent of troops, are married to someone else in the army.
A spokesman for the army acknowledged that children were being left without parents but said it was the price of a volunteer force and the expanded role of women.
However, concern about the effect of war on children goes further than military families. A recent opinion poll showed that 67 per cent of children aged between seven and 12 knew someone who was serving in the Gulf or someone who might soon be sent there, a finding that underlines the impracticality of advice to protect children from information about the war.
"To try to shield your children from the way things actually are is to fail them disastrously," Mr Jeff Riggenbach, a father of two boys, said.
Parents have been advised by everyone from the wife of the President, Mrs Barbara Bush, to media spokesmen and psychologists to monitor what their children watch on television.
Mrs Bush said she knew from her own grandchildren that "it's very scary"for them.
One of the most popular figures in children's television in the US - Mr Fred Rogers, a sort of cardigan-wearing uncle to all pre-schoolers - has made a series of soothing TV spots and everyone else has followed suit.
Most of the television networks have already run special programs about the war during children's viewing, including one in which the network's prime-time news anchorman, Mr Peter Jennings, got down on his haunches to answer kids'questions.
However, it has not been enough to stop the bad dreams and active imaginations of a lot of children. This week a mother from the Mid-West said her son was having such bad nightmares about suffocation and gas masks that she bought a mask from an army surplus store so the family could see how it worked and put her son's mind at rest.
© 1991 Sydney Morning Herald