I think most parents today have that moment, that story we share: Where were you on September 11, 2001? In the same way my parents told me about the assassinations of JFK and MLK or the moon landing, everyone was impacted—even if we weren’t directly involved. These cultural moments ripple out in each generation; they shape us and define us in ways we will likely always struggle to fully describe. Their impact is irrefutable, though.
These are those flashpoints where everything shifts, and they are particularly impactful when they occur before we reach adulthood. While we are still making sense of life, these destabilizing moments in history shape how we view the world, how we move through the world. Our parents had those moments, we had them, and our kids will have their own, too.
Just like my parents did, I’ve told my kids my own story of that sunny September day as a high school senior in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. My story is not that different from most; it’s so identical to millions of tales from that day that it’s nearly generic. I remember my math teacher trying to ignore the chaos outside the classroom, the frantic energy that coursed through the hallways as news of the first plane spread. I remember my biology teacher busting into the room and demanding, “Turn the TV on now, Mark!” He did, just as the second plane hit in New York.
Like everyone else that day, we pieced together information as best we could. By mid-morning, we knew that Flight 93 had crashed in a southwestern Pennsylvania field, not far from one of our favorite camping spots.
I have friends who were in college in Manhattan and had to run for their safety; friends who watched that old strip mine field in Shanksville smoke from their homes. I know people who lost loved ones that early fall morning; I have listened to those names as they are read each year in memory while the bell tolls. In my comfortable and happy childhood, September 11 was the moment I realized the world was much less safe than I’d been led to believe. It was naïveté on my part born of privilege, and it was shattered in an instant.
For my kids, though, 9/11 is different. In the way I know about the moon landing or those assassinations, my kids know about that day. Early reader books about MLK, 9/11, and World War II (the event that defined our grandparents’ generation) sit lined up on our shelf with equal weight, it seems.
It’s a worksheet about the twin towers that comes home in a school folder with 10/10 scrawled on the top next to a smiley face, it’s a picture book that my teenager wore out as a little kid, it’s a clip on the evening news each fall that sums up the horrors into a segment edited to fit between commercial breaks.
It’s a few IXL lessons they click through to make it to recess—and it’s a tale their teachers tell, too. Where they were, what they were doing, how it changed their world.
Several years ago, I took my kids, who were 10, 8, 8, and 3 at the time, to the Flight 93 Memorial. We took a guided tour and completed the Junior Ranger program, receiving little wooden badges emblazoned with “Flight 93 National Memorial” that now sit in a bin with other souvenirs from our travels.
The ranger explained the events of that morning to a group of children, who stood more solemnly than one would expect—I think they felt the weight of the space. I know I did. The memorial is simplistic in design, focused around highlighting the path the plane took as regular everyday heroes downed it right where we stood. The next summer, we took them to the Pentagon memorial on a trip to Washington, D.C. Our 2027 travel plans include New York City, where I am sure we will take a few moments to pay our respects at the World Trade Center as well. My kids will have memories of these moments. They will have a box of trinkets and souvenirs I foist off on them in their 40s, and they will look at that cheap little badge and connect it to a moment.
For our kids, the events that shifted everything are different, though. For them, the pandemic is the defining moment of their childhood: Not a single morning, but a multi-year trauma that roiled and ripped through their formative years. They’ll remember the week I spent in the hospital in 2020, and they’ll have a clip of them getting their COVID vaccine on NPR’s All Things Considered. There will be real feelings and emotions and pains associated with that world event—-and someday they will tell their kids about it.
As I sit here and think about that morning a quarter of a century ago, I am left with a few thoughts. The first is, of course, that I am old (high school was twenty-five years ago and somehow also last week?).
Deeper than that, though, is the realization that every generation’s defining moments ripple through the generations that follow. In big and small ways, the landmark events that shaped my parents as kids made them into the adults who raised me. The same is true for myself and my husband on our parenting journey. The edifying moments, as well as the traumatic moments, shape us into the adults (and parents) that we became. My kids may not have experienced September 11th first-hand, but they’ve been raised in a post-9/11 world that has affected everything from global politics to what they’re allowed to take on the plane to Disney World (no squishies). In the same way, the events that are shaping their childhood—the pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Gaza and Iran and more, and intense civil unrest in their own country—will shape the people (and, possibly, parents) that they will become.
It’s clear that all of the puzzle pieces that make up a childhood, all of the building blocks that create a life, affect us and shape us. It’s inevitable, and maybe not wholly bad. My favorite poem, Good Bones by Maggie Smith, hangs in our dining room. In it, she talks about how terrible this world can feel, but how as parents we live with that weight as we raise our children to take it on. That’s my hope for our collective kids: That they take all this mess they’ve inherited and are living through, the bad as well as the good, and create something lovely.
