“Only tell your children good stories, with happy endings,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg yesterday, urging adults and parents to keep what is happening in Iraq hidden from their children. “Don’t scare young children,” our mayor continued, “There's a reason why fairy tales end with the nice people winning. That's what we should do with our children.”
No way, respond psychologists. It’s impossible to hide what children see around them on the television or even in the demonstrations on Fifth Avenue. If anything, children should be listened to, because they have questions to ask and feelings to share. The mayor’s advice is not only naïve, but also extremely dangerous. Are all the children of New York like Alice in Wonderland? The mayor seems to want them to be like ostriches with their heads in the sand. He doesn’t want them to know about the bombs and missiles falling on Baghdad, and what they signify—that is, the agony and injury that befell many children like themselves. The tone that the Mayor would like for us to adopt is, in practice, that of the old-fashioned, wholesome “Once upon a time...”
Many, many years ago, New York had a first-rate mayor, because the people wanted him and he didn’t arrive in City Hall, like Bloomberg, thanks to $75 million thrown into an election campaign. That mayor was named Fiorello La Guardia, and he didn’t pull the wool over children’s eyes. When events in the city deprived children of what they had, like the newspaper strike, he went to the radio and read the comics to them.
Mayor Bloomberg would do well to listen to voices like this one from Milwaukee, Wis. Maggie Butterfield, director of community education at the local Children’s Hospital, says, “How can we keep our children unaware that we are in a war? In one way or another, they surely know.” She adds, “The key to the puzzle for parents is to listen carefully to how much the children say and to respond simply on the basis of what they know. For teachers, meanwhile, it would be best for them to base themselves around the Weekly Reader, the national news publication for school children, but to emphasize that there is no danger and to stress the concept of solidarity, whatever happens.”
Let Bloomberg go tell Kaitlyn Bayne, a 13-year-old from Tuscon, Arizona, that she must be treated the way that he wants young people in the Big Apple to be treated—that is, to have her parents read her “Snow White.” Kaitlyn has been quoted by the Associated Press for how much she knows about the situation in Iraq, and because she discusses these issues, whether with her parents or with her peers at school. Rather than reading “Snow White,” she is reading “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
