Talking to my 8-year-old about Osama Bin Laden

Today, I had a long converstaion about Osama Bin Laden with my 8 year old daughter. I hadn't planned on doing this at any specific point in time. You see, when the September 11 attacks occurred, my daughter was only 2 years old (ironically the same age as me when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon). However, the following picture happened to be on the CNN homepage at the time she walked in the room.

"Daddy, who's that man?"

"Osama Bin Laden. He was responsible for killing lots of people. Even women and children."

"Really? He looks nice in that picture."

That's how the conversation got started. Interestigly, each answer kept prompting a new question from her to try to understand something that is in many ways not understandable.

Explaining What Happened

I decided that showing her a video from September 11 and explaining what is happening would help her understand better what happened (and how not nice this person really is). Here is what I showed her.

What I didn't anticipate was my own reaction to this video. At 2:55 into the clip, the director timed a cell phone conversation of a victim with the footage of the building he was in collapsing. Hearing him cry "Oh God" right as the building started collapsing had a profound affect on me and really got my tears rolling (I'm starting to tear up right now even as I write this). My daughter was surprised that I was crying (mainly because she'd never seen me cry before), but I told her it made me sad to know that we just heard this man die, and that he would never see his family again, and that I remembered going to the top of that building with her mommy a few times before she was born.

Explaining Why it happened

The next thing she wanted to know was why. Actually, that's not quite accurate. What she really wanted to do was to understand what would cause Osama Bin Laden to want to kill so many people. I realized that this was not the time to give a simple answer. I was not going to say "He was an evil man," or "It was because of his religion," or even "I don't know."

My response focused more on the fact that he had certain beliefs and that he didn't like people who didn't believe the same things as him. Of course, she wanted to understand more about those beliefs, so I started by talking about his beliefs about how women should live their lives and went on to talk about TV and other things that he believe are evil. I continued by telling her that one of the reasons why we live in such a great country is that we accept people who think, act, and look different from ourselves.

She also wanted to understand why people would kill themselves to try to kill other people. I had to think about the answer to this one for a minute. I told her that sometimes people are told that God wants them to do something. When they believe that God wants them to do it, they don't need to question what they're doing and can believe that doing even the most horrible things is the right thing to do. Because nobody can understand God or God's intentions, there's no use in questioning what he wants us to do, even if it seems wrong. I told her that Osama Bin Laden said that God wanted them kill all those people.

I told her that Bin Laden was wrong and that I believed that God loves all people, regardless of whether they watched TV, wore the right clothes, or went to a church. I also told her that I believed that one of the most important things taught by Jesus is how people should treat other people, especially people who have wronged us. That because God loves everybody, what is most important to him is how we treat each other and that anthing we're told that contradicts this is wrong.

Reflecting...

Ever since first becoming a father, I realized how important it was to come to terms with my views on religion and morality. When a child asks her first questions about these things, it's easy to provide an answer that doesn't require you to do this. Eventially they will start asking deeper questions -- Where it becomes important to them to take those abstract concepts and understand how they apply to something real (other than wishing for things or wanting to know what happens when people die). That wasn't the original intention of the discussion ("Daddy, who is that man?"), but by answering what she wanted to know and understanding my feelings on the matter, I was able to handle difficult questions and hopefully help to raise a compassionate, caring person.