Children are not a big feature of the landscape of Manhattan, where 75 percent of residents are single; still, estimates of the number of young people who had their lives damaged forever two weeks ago run to the thousands.
Indeed, the deaths in the World Trade Center of about 700 employees of just one company, the bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, are thought to have taken a parent from about 1,500 children.
Many of those who commuted to the complex from New York's four other boroughs and places nearby such as New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester county were parents in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
Some counselors said that younger children might become subdued and withdrawn if they did not get the opportunity to express and understand their grief; those of school age might experience complaints such as bedwetting, headaches and stomach pains from holding in their feelings; and adolescents were more at risk from drugs and alcohol and could be more likely to attempt suicide or run away from home.
"Displaced anger is something that we see not just in children but also in adults," said Scott Davidson, a child-family therapist working with the American Red Cross in Washington. "Anger is a very natural emotion but they must learn to understand it rather than to act out of it."
Ruth Kreitzman, a Manhattan clinical social worker who counsels bereaved children, said: "In these special circumstances there are a number of special challenges we've not confronted before. One is the violence, and not only that but the graphic violence that's been assimilated over and over again though the media." Another was that people were classified as missing for so long, understandably because it allowed them to cling to some hope.
"There was this period of confusion when what you want to do with children is to be very, very clear and in language appropriate for their age [to] let them know what's happened," said Kreitzman of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, the biggest mental health agency in the US. This failure to confront the inevitable was not necessarily a mistake but it did create new problems.
Younger children exposed to television footage of the planes hitting the towers might not understand that they were watching repeats but might think that they were seeing a new attack each time.
"Some will think that the building's gone down and come up again," she said.
Davidson said media should switch their focus toward informing the grief-stricken of the services available to them. "It would be real helpful if they started covering some of the healing process that's in place. There's a need for a phase that's not about what the terrorists did but that gets out some of the information of what's available. The media need to capture the fact that after the attacks there has been a great wave of caring and people wanting to help and flying across the country to do so."
He spoke also of the hidden victims, those who were not related to a casualty but were still suffering. "What gets missed is that hundreds or thousands of children have parents who are severely traumatized, who worked with those who died for years. They're going home and trying to be parents and the children can sense their trauma."
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