Coping With Our Kids' Fears After Charlottesville

The other night, my oldest daughter came down a while after bedtime, crying hysterically. Why? When she could finally catch her breath and get words out, her answer was chilling: "I keep thinking of Nazis with torches." 

It is a scenario that I never thought I’d need to address with my children, but her fear is one that is horrifyingly rational this week. I had struggled with whether to discuss the events in Charlottesville, Va., with her. We’ve talked about the Newtown school massacre and various terrorist attacks, and those were when she was somewhat younger. Then we passed a peace vigil near our house on Monday night, and in response to her queries about what was happening, I told her a bit about the white supremacist rally and the violence that ensued. (With my younger kids, there was no doubt: This was not something we'd talk about unless they asked us directly about something they'd heard.)  

My daughter didn't say much when I first described, briefly, what had happened. But here I was, more than 24 hours later, needing to figure out what to say. 

“How do we know they won’t come here?” she asked that night. I know she is aware her grandfather—my wife’s father—was a child survivor of the Holocaust, someone who at an age similar to hers lost his entire immediate family to Nazis. I am guessing this was on her mind that night, and neither my wife nor I knew what to say in that moment. 

During the next few minutes, I tried several tacks from which I ended up retreating. My first natural instinct was to assure her they would not come to our city, our neighborhood. But can I really assert that as fact with any honesty? With nine far-right rallies planned this weekend—one here in New York—there is no way I can say that white supremacist threats would remain at a distance. 

It’s much easier to calm our kids’ fears of monsters under the bed or the thunder rattling the house. We know the former is not real and the latter will not hurt us. We can hold our kids tight and play the savior, assuring them they are safe and we are here to help them banish their fears and get back to sleep.

This is different, as so much else seems to be these days. We grown-ups are ourselves struggling to deal with our own fears and trying to process how we’ve come to the place where fears of neo-Nazis with torches and guns here in the U.S. are entirely realistic. And this is not from some paranoid fringe. As I’ve been processing the incident with my daughter, a Facebook friend who is not prone to extremes or hysterics posted, “Last night, I had a nightmare involving men in white outfits marching with burning torches on a dark street and a bonfire with babies being thrown in.” 

So we are called on to reassure our kids even as we seek reassurance ourselves. Our own quest may seem to be in vain sometimes, but we cannot fail to offer comfort to our children, even as we cannot lie to them and give them false hope either. I wasn't a parent when the Sept. 11 attacks happened, but I imagine the challenge was similar: This was (and is) not some distant conflict, but rather the reality in our own cities.