Seven-year-old Galil Rosin – at left wearing a maroon shirt – is pictured here with some of his his second-grade classmates at the Hareches (“The Mountain Range”) school, located in Lavon, a community settlement in northern Israel a little more than 13 miles from the border with Lebanon (Photo courtesy of Ory Rosin)
Ory Rosin and his son, Galil (Photo courtesy of Ory Rosin)
By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
A few days after October 7, Ory Rosin, Laura Milo and their seven-year-old son, Galil, were bicycling in their northern Israel town of Akko when the sirens sounded. It was a long way back home, and Galil could barely keep up with his parents as the alarms grew ever more persistent.
“We had to grab him, and it made everything very bad,” recalled Ory Rosin, contacted via Partnership2Gether. “It was very traumatic for him.”
It turned out to be a false alarm – no Hezbollah rockets were headed their way – “and we told him, but that didn’t make him much calmer,” his father says. “And since then, he has been asking wherever we go and wherever we are, ‘Where do we go in case of an alarm? What happens if I’m in the shower? What happens if I’m sleeping?’”
The experience raises a fundamental question: How should adults talk to children about war and othe
r highly fraught subjects? It is a query with decidedly few clear answers, though resources like Jewish Family & Career Services can offer valuable perspectives.
“Usually when they start a conversation like that, the first question is, ‘What have you heard,’ because that gives you some information as to what they already know,” advises Clint Nowicke, a Louisville clinical psychologist who specializes in counseling children. Far better for a trusted adult to acknowledge difficult issues in a child than pretending they don’t matter, Nowicke advises.
“Research shows that cocooning, which is when parents try to block out any and all instances of media, doesn’t work,” he says. “It actually makes the kid more anxious because suddenly it’s become a forbidden topic. Whereas if you don’t do the cocooning, and don’t linger on it, that’s the most effective way to address things like war with kids.
“So maybe you’re flipping through the news, and they start talking about it. You don’t immediately change the channel and say stuff like ‘Don’t look at that!’ Just act like it’s part of the day,” Nowicke says. “And if they do have a question, they’ll ask. That’s where you can ask them, ‘How do you know about what’s going on?’ Or ‘What are your thoughts on it?’ Basically, the younger they are, the less information they need and the less media they need to have access to.”
If there is one saving grace along these lines regarding elementary school-age children, it’s that most of them don’t yet have smartphones. Children under 10 still tend to rely on their parents, or perhaps another trusted adult figure, as the principal sources for objective information about difficult topics. A key imperative, Nowicke emphasizes, is to cast oneself as a reassuring presence — especially with a subject as sensitive as the war in Gaza.
“For some kids, everything in the world is scary and they’re going to react to anything and everything they hear about,” Nowicke says. “Other kids are pretty good at compartmentalizing and recognizing that it’s literally on the other side of the world.”
Younger children, whose worldview is by definition constricted, often don’t grasp geography and distance the way grownups do. A conversation might include exploring to a child that an event is “happening on the other side of the globe, and then show them a globe so they can see how far away it is,” Nowicke advises.
Talking about the war – or any potentially upsetting subject – should be reserved for a time and a place where both parent and child can participate without undue distraction.
“I think the biggest thing is having a time set aside for that one-on-one connection,” says Sarah Roos, a clinical psychologist on the staff of Jewish Family & Career Services. “And then really letting the child lead the conversation. So there might be a starter like, ‘Hey, you might have heard there’s a lot of stuff going on,’ or just starting in a very general and broad way and letting the child tell you what they know about it, their thoughts, their feelings — all those things with the goal of reassuring the child that they are physically safe here. That’ll give you a good clue, developmentally, what would be appropriate for them. Because you don’t necessarily want to jump into a whole bunch of tedious details with someone who’s in elementary school, versus someone in high school who might have more access to information or a general knowledge base. Then there might be more of a space to have a specific conversation.”
The fundamental dilemma then becomes how much to tell a child, and how much to withhold. Seven-year-old Galil Rosin’s second grade is a case in point. “When he got back to school,” his father recalls, “we found another one of the girls in his class is a cousin of one of the kidnapped (hostages). This started bothering us. We weren’t trying to block all data from him, but at least not telling him things that he hadn’t heard. But when he heard that a very good friend of ours – a mother – was also kidnapped in Gaza and she was brought back, after a while we had to talk to him about it.”
Another reality is that his family lives close to an Arab village, whose inhabitants are also his family’s neighbors. “It was very important to tell (Galil) that is not at risk because of this. We live among people we trust. We have the army and the police and everything we need to defend us.”
Still, there is no denying the immense security breakdown on October 7. “We tried to say to him that there was a failure,” Ory Rosin says, “a specific failure at a specific time, and that can never happen again because we will never let it happen again. You are not going to kidnapped or anything like that. That is something that happened, and everyone is dealing with fixing the situation now.”
Regardless of surrounding conditions, “we try to make him understand that he can ask anything,” his father emphasizes, acknowledging that a seven-year-old is capable of appreciating difficult circumstances.
“He’s exactly the age that we actually can see his mind developing new perspectives,” Rosin says. “Before he goes to sleep is when he’s asking the hardest questions. Lately we were talking about what’s going on in Gaza, we try to say to him that this war is bad for everyone, and that we hope less innocent people will be injured or hurt.”
Inevitably, however, some questions have no easy answers.
“Sometimes I tell him that it’s something I need to think about, so you will understand,” his father says. And while their daughter, Naomi, is too young to grasp the grimmest realities of wartime Israel, Rosin says that she – and occasionally even her brother — had episodes of bedwetting reflecting abrupt changes in their daily routine.
The options were telling. “Until a month ago, she used to ask where we would go in case of an alarm,” her father recalls. “She doesn’t understand the meaning of the question. She’s asking it because she heard her brother ask it. And we answered her directly: ‘In case of an alarm, we go there, or we go there.’ We try not to make her worry. And when she’d be back into a routine, she’s okay. We’re very privileged, because not many children in Israel feel like that these days.”
It’s vital to remember that children are not simply miniature adults. “A lot of times they don’t know what words to use to ask questions,” Nowicke says. “The younger the kid is, the more they’re going to focus on things that are salient to their own world. So, they’ll ask questions like, ‘How are the kids going to school if there’s a war happening?’ or ‘What’s happening to all their toys?’ Older kids (might) ask, ‘Does that mean they’re going to institute the draft again?’ Or ‘Is this going to interrupt my trip on Birthright?’ They’re a little bit more pragmatic.”
And it’s perfectly okay for parents to admit they don’t have all the answers, and to advise their children that it’s a good idea to seek out someone who might be more able to help in a particular situation.
“You can tell them, ‘I’m honestly not sure, but that’s a good question,” Nowicke says. “Let’s go ask Rabbi David and see what he would say about it.’ Because no question or concern that a kid has is silly or not a good question, because they probably aren’t the only kid worrying about it. We don’t want to dismiss those questions, even if to us they seem simplistic.”
Whatever the situation, parents should always be aware that a child will pick up on their reactions. “It’s important for parents to have their own spaces to process what’s going on,” Roos says. “It’s okay to share some of your own feelings or thoughts about what’s going on, as long as you’re doing it in a developmentally appropriate way. But your child shouldn’t be the primary person you’re processing it with. You should have your own support and resources and friends.”