On back-to-school night in 2005, I eagerly entered my youngest child’s first grade classroom. The walls were festooned with brightly colored responses to the prompt: “Draw something you remember.”

I scanned for my son’s picture and was shocked when I encountered his drawing: an airplane flying into New York’s World Trade Center.

“I saw the picture you drew up on the bulletin board,” I said to him later that night. “Do you really remember seeing planes flying into the twin towers?”

He looked me in the eyes and replied, “No, Mommy. But I do remember you crying.”

My son was not quite 2 years old on on Sept. 11, 2001. As a mother, I despaired to learn that my own reaction to that day’s tragedies had stuck with him so viscerally. As a professor and researcher of children’s media, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

My son’s memory was likely influenced not just by my emotional reaction but by the media around him that his parents and siblings consumed in the weeks and years after the attacks – a mix of TV news and content geared toward kids.

More than two decades later, children have many more ways and more platforms to encounter frightening images and stories, often without an adult nearby to help them make sense of what they see. But the ways children’s programming such as “Sesame Street” responded to 9/11 offer a useful lesson: Rather than trying to shield children completely from disturbing events, adults can help them process what they’ve seen in honest, reassuring and age-appropriate ways.

You can’t shield kids from what’s happening

Psychologist Joanne Cantor was one of the first to study what scares children about news and how they respond to it.

She concluded that what frightens children varies by their developmental stage. Younger children tend to notice and respond to stories about natural disasters and tragedies about kids or animals. Older children are afraid of stories focusing on personal injury and physical........

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