The Good, the Bad and the Inquisitive

Friday, April 20, 2007

Page 11

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

The Good, the Bad and the Inquisitive

By J’AMY PACHECO

As a mother, I keep my child relatively sheltered. Movies and television programs are monitored, and if a book is grade level six or above, I usually read it first to make sure the content is age appropriate for my 11-year-old.

I do this because I’m in no hurry for my little girl to grow up. The way I see it, she gets 12 years to be a child, a few years to be a teenager, and then she’ll be an adult for the rest of her life. Why rush it?

Recently, however, an issue arose that left me wondering when to let the adult world in, and when to slam that door.

As I’ve mentioned here before, one of the requirements at my daughter’s school is that each student do some sort of community service project. This can be as simple as picking up trash from a public park or helping an elderly neighbor pull weeds.

Never one to take the easy way out, my daughter – who already performs a weekly service tutoring kindergartners — decided to write a play about hate.

She chose the project after reading newspaper accounts of high school students engaging in on-campus race riots. The thought of potentially getting beat up at school because of her ethnic heritage was too much to bear, so my daughter set out to write something that she hoped would make kids her age grow up tolerant.

To help her get started, I took her to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. There, she developed an interest in Anne Frank and the Holocaust that led to me buying a copy of Anne’s diary, and a history of the Holocaust.

As she worked on her play, she researched other elements of hate. She studied Martin Luther King Junior, with whom she was familiar, and learned about the current genocide in Darfur, which neither of us knew anything about.

She kept going back to the Holocaust. She wanted to know if any of the concentration camps still stood, and if one could tour the secret annex in which Anne Frank’s family and others spent two years in hiding. She spent hours looking up places like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and reading online biographies of the people who hid with the Franks.

Of course, one can’t study the Holocaust without reading about Adolf Hitler, and my daughter spent hours reading about Nazi Germany as well. At this point, she’s probably the fifth-grade expert on Anne Frank and the Holocaust.

I’d consider this a good thing, if it weren’t for two factors. One is that in reading Anne Frank’s diary, which I hadn’t picked up for decades, she got into some material that we haven’t spent a lot of time on — yet.

“Mom,” she’d call out from the back seat of the car. “What’s a prophylactic?” And later, “What’s necking?” Yikes.

The other was discovered one night as we prepared for bed following a study session.

“I don’t think I should go to sleep,” she said, explaining that she’d been reading “some disturbing things.”

Since she’d not only toured the museum’s Holocaust exhibit but also heard a concentration camp survivor describe the atrocities she and her family endured during her captivity, I wondered what she could have read that could be more disturbing. She told me, and I realized that it wasn’t more disturbing, it was just the pre-bedtime hour during which she read the material.

I’m pleased that my daughter is so fascinated with history, but I’m wondering where I should cut off the flow of information. She needs the information for her project.

Besides, she’s already aware of the potential for human violence. She’s a member of the 9/11 generation, having started kindergarten the same week terrorists murdered thousands of people in New York and Washington D.C. Because of this, she has always been afraid of the possibility of attack, and remains scared of helicopters flying overhead.

Additionally, in spite of the suburban neighborhoods in which she has gone to school, she has on several occasions experienced a school lockdown. Having experienced a lockdown as an adult, I can only imagine how it feels to be a child made to huddle quietly on the floor in the dark.

I realize that I can’t protect my “baby” from everything. The question is, how much should I try to keep out? Is it healthy to let my child feed her curiosity about one of the most horrific chapters in modern history? When should I say, “Enough?”

The topic is enough to keep me up nights. On the bright side, that means my daughter won’t be up alone…