Parenting anxieties: Contexualising WW2 for a nine year old
OK, so I have a very nerdy, mildly ADHD 9 year old boy who has been fascinated with WW2 for ages. All this started with him getting obsessed with the Titanic when he was about 4, which then led us to look at some old Nat Geo magazines about Robert Ballard's oceanographic expeditions which then led him to get fascinated with the German battleship Bismarck and Operation Rheinubung. The drama of big gun battleships got him in the feels and in the five years since then he has been deeply into naval stuff, particularly WW2 naval combat ever since. Musically this got him into Sabaton and their WW1/2 related metal songs. He actually sat down and watched the 1960s black and white Sink the Bismarck on YouTube, along with stuff like Midway (the version from a few years back). He thinks aircraft carriers are cool and ate up both Top Gun movies and is now getting into submarines (loved The Hunt for Red October) but wistfully repeatedly tries to reason me into agreeing that navies should have stuck with big gun battleships.
However, this has manifested as a deep fascination with Germany in general- he knows the basics about fascism, the Holocaust and Wehrmacht atrocities (but still can't quite get why it happened) but to a small boy I understand the OMG WUNDERWAFFEN attraction. Coincidentally his best friend is an ethnically German girl which further gets him a bit confused because he can't quite grok the difference between "my friend is German, I think German engineering is cool" and "but we still condemn fascism".
To be clear- he understands why racism and prejudice are wrong. As an ethnic minority in our country I suspect he'll come into contact with racial prejudice sooner rather than later so hopefully life experience will lead him away from the alt-right bits of history nerdery.
We're in Singapore, which means there's very little consciousness of the Holocaust in public education- our history syllabus (fairly enough) deals with the Pacific War and its effects on postwar decolonisation when it touches on WW2 whereas the European theatre is just vague background.
I don't know where I'm going with this, really- I like that my son is a history buff, and I don't want to cut him off from intellectual interests he's passionate about but on the other hand I'm wondering how I can let him enjoy this while contextualising it from a progressive perspective.
#notaparent
Maybe you're worrying too much?
Actual parents will probably chime in with some complex and equally correct approach, but your kid seems to be on the right path. German engineering is indeed very cool, and that seems to be his focus, not idolizing Nazism.
Instead of focusing on historical concepts that are too abstract for a 9-year-old, I might simply show him content about the engineering behind the Ally war effort instead. Don't curb his fascination. Expand it.
What cool things did US, UK, and others made in the same period?
I just want to point out that once he starts going on the internet and trying to find communities which appreciate war technology, especially WW2 engineering tech, there are places with thin facades that onboard people into Nazi-apologia. The same crap happens in the grand-strategy game community with certain Hearts of Iron fans.
His hobby is super cool and should be encouraged, but I would advocate a bit more supervision than most other hobbies require since there are bad actors out there who would manipulate his kid's passion for the subject. @Flocculencio's concerns aren't totally without merit.
This is the issue- having said that us being ethnically Indian and not White means that these sorts of people are less likely to be that attractive to him but I do need to and intend to keep an eye on him and keep myself involved in this as a father-son history buff activity. I guess parental involvement is the best solution
Honestly sounds like you're well on the right track for this. It's kids with uninvolved parents who are vastly more at risk for this sort of thing. As an aside, as someone who's spent some time morbidly reading neo-Nazi material online (know thy enemy and all that) -- not being white is only a minor inconvenience if they can radicalize somebody receptive to it. And there's a surprising number of non-white Nazis out there with some serious cognitive dissonance going on.
Yup and where Indians are concerned there are a lot of extreme right Indian guys who get hooked on the idea of Aryan purity...
Unfortunately a lot of different racial supremacists actually get along. Many of them don't believe X race should be exterminated but that the races should be completely segregated, through force if necessary, and countries should be monocultural ethnostates.
There are white supremacists and black supremacists and most likely Indian supremacists who just believe in the "stick to your own" message and like it when they see others promoting that message. It's especially prominent these days with people who are strongly against interracial relationships.
There was an Indian guy on LinkedIn who made the rounds for comparing his work with Hitler. He described him as an “action taker”.
There is a strange(or maybe not so strange given the Hindutva movement) minor fascination with Hitler in India as a sort of 'made the trains run on time' Strongman. You get a bit of that in East/SE Asia too.
As long as you don't give him free access to the internet, he'll be fine. Let him click through Wikipedia or find him media that doesn't endorse the Nazis. Most likely, he'll move onto something else in a year or two. Just limit his access to online conversation.
Yeah, he watches a lot of documentaries about military/naval engineering and such.
It's just that the Axis unfortunately tend more toward the 9-year-old-boy "HEY HEINZ, WHAT IF WE MADE A TANK BUT IT WAS ALSO AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER WITH GUNS THAT SHOOT GUNS?" kind of thinking :D
But yes, maybe I am worrying a bit too much.
So, I went through a phase in childhood where I was really fascinated with WWII aviation, and I just have to say, your description matches perfectly with the crazy, probably meth fueled ideas german engineers came up with during the later parts of the war. In my opinion, the crazy ideas where tried because the germans knew they were loosing the logistics war. They knew they had a tight timeline, and were therfore willing to be a bit riskier on the engineering side. For the allies, especially america, it was known that it was only a matter of time, and could be more conservative and keep their forces a bit more conventional.
(though if you want some of that same feel of 'lets make it bigger' the germans had with their tanks, seriously get him into american planes at the time. My favorite were the p-38 lightning (one of the more uniqe looking designs the allies had) and the p-47 thunderbolt, which was almost a tank with wings.)
Oh definitely- he is into planes (again, a fascination with wunderwaffen like the Me 262) but the big gun dreadnoughts still hold his heart. Since he's short-sighted, I also think he can envision himself being a naval officer but not a pilot.
My personal favourite WW2 plane is the deHavilland Mosquito. Jack of all trades made of wood.
The poor chap keeps trying to reason out how sophisticated engineering can trump logistics and ruefully realising that it can't.
Woman here, also a history buff. One thought is to watch JoJo Rabbit the film yourself and share it with him at the age you think is appropriate. My guess would be 13, but it's your call.
As far as books go, graphic novel Maus, Anne Frank's Diary, Elie Wiesel's Night, but again read them yourself and decide what age to share them.
He might appreciate the book Run Silent run Deep. This is an interest that will grow and mature as he does. Best of luck.,
Yeah, I was thinking of Maus and JoJo Rabbit and the like but he's still too young. Maus is a masterpiece. Haven't seen JoJo Rabbit yet.
I'll check out Run Silent, Run Deep. He liked the carrier aviation parts of Michener's The Bridges at Toki-Ri.
Thanks
He might also appreciate The Wind Rises which is a Studio Ghibli film about the aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi who designed the Mitsubishi Zero during WW2 in Imperial Japan.
Maus is really good, along with Night that she had recommended. Night is the memoir of Elie Wiesel of him surviving the Holocaust and his experiences. It is not a long read, I think it is around 100 pages. I had read Night when I was in 7th or 8th grade in the US, which is about 11 to 13 years of age.
If he is still interested in WWII stuff when he is older, I would recommend the Anatomy of the Nuremburg Trials by Telford Taylor. Taylor wrote this to act like a personal memoir and as a history book. Because he included some information that he would not have known at the time, such as letters that his colleagues had wrote.
Also check out the YouTube channel the Tank Museum. They have videos from the very first tanks from WWI to modern main battle tanks. But they have more videos on the WWII tanks like the Tigers, Churchills, the Italian tanklettes and the Sherman tanks. And along with the paper thin armoured Japanese ones, I think. They also have some top (and bottom) ten videos that different people and YouTubers did, which is fun to watch because they all have different criteria that they judging from.
Jojo Rabbit is definitely more "challenging for a kid but not extremely traumatic". I don't want to spoil the movie for you, but it's more about the everyday experiences of a young German boy than it is about human suffering or trauma (though that comes into play too).
Maus is imo fare for a high school student/adult audience since a large part of its focus is life in a concentration camp and intergenerational trauma coming out of that.
I started watching Das Boot with him since itlpresents a gripping but unromanticised view of the war. It's also a really good film.
The tricky part is that sometimes bad people do good things. A person may be hateful but also write a tv show, or a book, or a comedy routine, that many people like. We need to teach our children to spot the negative things their friends do.
I think as part of your discussions with him you could introduce the idea of propaganda. "Imagine that I run a whole country. And I want to do something, but I think the people might disagree with me. How do I persuade them?" and then talk about the series of small steps that lead to genocide. Talk about the fact that people designed the uniforms to look cool, that people were paid to work full time to design posters or write leaflets or make films that made the Nazis look cool. And that it's okay to like cool stuff, but we need to remember that behind that cool stuff there might be some really dark background.
When he's a bit older you can point out that people still wear Hugo Boss suits, drive Volkswagon beetles, wear "Beobachtungs-uhren" watches. And that most people doing this do not know the Nazi history of these things, but a few do, and they appear to be celebrating it, and we need to be cautious.
Thank you, this is really good advice!
Broaden the horizon. There's cool tech and mech on every side and era. What about search and rescue mech? Energy and mineral rigs? Hydro dam? Large hedron collider? How machines at home works, such as blender mixer lawn mower shaver?
Yeah, I've tried- I even pulled out my awesome old edition of The Way Things Work by David Macaulay (still highly recommended) but he tends to get hyperfixated. Will keep on with it.
Anyway, I've told him that if he wants to go study naval engineering in Germany (as is currently his wont) he'll have to have a good general science grounding so hopefully that will lead him down some other rabbit holes.
Randall Munroe 's thing explainer? Who's got the best navy right now, America? Is he internet?
Anyway cool mech is cool mech. lots of not cool mech have killed far more people.....it's people that kill people. Sneak an ad or two in there for other stuff and I say go with it.
Yes, I actually have the Thing Explainer knocking around the house. Might give it a try when he's a tiny bit older.
Trouble is he's a competent but not enthusiastic reader. It all depends on something grabbing his attention, and he's generally suspicious of novelty (he's on his third read-through of Lord of the Rings, for example, but is very reluctant to try other stuff).
Yes!
I loved the book Incredible Cross-Sections as a child, I greatly recommend it.
It could be helpful to talk with your kid about how history isn't monolithic. The technology, which is indeed very cool, was not an indicator of the progress of culture as a whole, German or otherwise. As is true today.
For a kid, I think the most abstract quality of WWII history is how unbelievably cutting-edge the science was, and how simultaneously crude much of the culture of the war was (the Nazis' fascination with the occult; the British misinformation campaign about carrots improving eyesight, which persists today; the ethnic pseudo-science & racism of the Holocaust itself). Advanced radar systems were being developed not far from farms where rural civilians on every side still lived more or less pre-industrial lives that hadn't changed in a few centuries.
I remember my own mother getting upset that I wanted to take home a Holocaust history book called "The Evil That Men Do" from the library when I was eight or nine. Prior to finding that book, I'd also been a pretty avid reader of books by military buffs on things like the chase and sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and the planes of the RAF.
As a kid born in '80 and raised by parents who tried to expose me to the same stuff they grew up on, I was fed a diet of classic Disney & Warner Bros. cartoons from the 40s & 50s, many, many of which were undisguised WWII propaganda. I also was only allowed to watch extremely kid-friendly movies, which to my parents meant classic golden- and silver-era Hollywood --- so again, lots of war propaganda.
This was pre-internet, and as you've gathered I was a pretty sheltered kid, so fortunately my exposure to present-day Nazi recruitment was zero. However, I gleaned that something else was going on that these military buffs and William Holden movies weren't discussing. Which led to me asking my mom to check out "The Evil That Men Do" when I was in the second or third grade.
There's no way I actually read the whole thing (it was a serious history book and I was still nine), but I can tell you that it made a deep impression on me. I was confused by it, and committed a faux pas when I brought it up at the dinner table with the parents of a Jewish classmate because I was confused by it. I resisted reading Night in school because I felt like I already knew that stuff; as an older teenager I read Sophie's Choice and watched American History X in horror. I still get annoyed by jingoism in American media, because it smacks of the same contradiction --- the most impressive technology in the world, deployed for some of the dumbest and evillest purposes imaginable (be it the Holocaust or the US war on terror; not to call them the same thing, of course).
To this day I trace my fuck-you attitude towards the far right back to picking up The Evil That Men Do at age nine, and scaring the hell out of my mother because I wanted to read about such an awful subject. All that just to say that I don't think you need to panic quite yet.
Thanks for the reassurance!
Just to clarify, I'm not panicking, I'm glad he's into history, I just want to make sure it's channeled appropriately. As I said in another post here the best way to do that is by being an involved dad
I was ten or eleven when in geography, we had to pick a topic relating to the country, and present it to the class. I picked WW2 when we had Poland, as I had heard Poland mentioned with WW2, and I was interested in WW2. My presentation resulted in our teacher showing footage from the holocaust. It shocked me to my very core, and I would say that is the day I lost my innocence. It is also the day I firmly gained a complete and utter hatred for fascists. I would highly recommend showing him the holocaust, in all it's horrific detail. Talk about why the holocaust happened, how it happened, and which were affected. Then talk about how there are still nazis today, and that they often outright deny the existances of the holocaust, despite the very clear evidence. It might seem overkill, but as someone who himself was and is a history nerd, it is a must. Sooner or later, he will be exposed to the atrocities of history, and I think it's better comming from you and not some internet nazi who'll try and spin the story. I plan to do the same to my daughter, but it'll be a bit easier, as I have the book "...om detta må ni berätta..." (about this you might speak). It's a swedish book about the holocaust, with facts, tales from survivors, and a ton of pictures. I saw you mentioned you were a ethnical minority, and it is worth bringing up that the germans would have cast you into the same fate as the jews, romani, homosexuals, communists, and any other group they deemed unclean. Also talk about the atrocities of a nation and how it doesn't mean their engineering is bad as well. Him liking german engineering doesn't mean he supports the action of the geman nation. It simply means he likes engineering. Same with history. Might be hard to grasp at first, but keep working it, keep repeating it, and it'll stick. I am really happy you are enganging with your sons interest, I wish my father had done the same with me. Be there and help him, and learn with him, and it'll something he'll continue to love for the rest of his life. I don't know any good resources in english to use, as Sweden creates a lot of resources here. The one I can think of right now is "The Last Days" documentary by Spielberg. But searching up pictures and talking about it, probably will be enough, as the pictures are just horrifying.
I'm definitely going on a sidenote here regarding the translation of the title.
According to the Swedish wikipedia article it is a reference to Joel 1:3 in the old testament.
In English, this is something like
A more accurate translation of the title could be may you tell about this, to capture the grammatical imperative. Even so, I think it also loses a lot of context or connotations, specifically with regards to the word "må".
The dictionary of the Swedish Academy (Svenska Akademiens Ordbok (SAOB)) is generally a very thorough source with citations, but it is of course in Swedish and it has a long list of abbreviations it uses to make descriptions more concise.
"Må" in this context can carry at least the following meaning/context/connotations:
Numbers in parentheses are the referenced entries in SAOB.
In other words: you can read it as not just conveying that you are allowed to speak about it, but that you shall be able to do so. Even though a world where there was no cause to speak about it (i.e. where it did not happen) would be preferable, we do not have that privilege. Thus, it is imperative that it be known and it is the responsibility of all of us to ensure that it is.
My god, you absolute beast! You went above and beyond! It is a VERY good analysis! I am an absolute idiot when it comes to grammatics, thank you for going the extra mile!
But yes, it is also what we should do. What we MUST do. It is our duty as adults to continue bringing forth the absolute horror that was the holocaust, and educate the younger ones, so we never have to see it repeated. As we see a rise of the extreme right in Europe, it is more critical than ever that we speak of the atrocities. How they came to be and how they happened. We have to talk about what nazism and fascism is, and how it isn't just words that are too lightly thrown around. The amount of right wing extremist people who say "you just call someone you disagree with a nazi!", while also being in a party with STRONG connections and roots to nazism, is scary. We must view nazism for the very thing it is; a spoken act, and promise, of violence.
Yes, I feel in Western countries you have a lot of targeted resources for this. In Singapore, like I said, the focus is rightly more on the Pacific War with attention to the Japanese atrocities and the war as the catalyst for anticolonialism.
As a teacher I have encountered kids using slang like 'Don't Jew me' to their friends and have had to point out why this is wrong- to be fair to the kids they didn't harbour specific antisemitic attitudes and didn't equate the slang with the actual Jewish people.
Since we have a miniscule Jewish population, and no local history of antisemitic tropes to them Jews are from historical/biblical times. I don't know if my explanation got through to them. I hope it did.
Yeah, I understand. But, you could use the japanese atrocities as a good reference and comparison to what the germans did. They both did equally fucked up things. It could help carry the message, as the japanese engineering was also quite impressive. The story behind the Zero planes are a perfect example.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with teacher I knew. We are both living in the US, I as a native born American, and she as a German who immigrated to the US and started a family (American husband and 3 American children). She works at a German school in the US (a school where the kids would learn about Germany's language and history that served children of German immigrants), and she was in charge of teaching the gifted/accelerated students. However, she ran into a quandary with her 4th graders (9-10 years old). It's standard practice at that school for the accelerated students to work two years ahead, so her 4th grade students were to learn 6th grade (11-12 years old) material.
It's only a two year difference, of course, but at her school the 6th grade material taught the holocaust. At 9-10 years old, a child is usually at a point in life where for their own mental health/development they need to believe that the world is "safe" and "good." By 11-12 years old, they start to be at an age when they're ready to learn how horrifying humanity can be.
So this teacher had to ask herself: are these 9-10 year olds ready to "lose their innocence" in that way? Watering it down is not an option, for a number of very valid reasons.
I don't know how she resolved the quandary, but I hope it worked out for her and her students.
For another perspective, my father's family is Jewish so I'm exposed to a lot of talk about antisemitism and Jewish history on a regular basis, and my mom's family (who aren't Jewish) immigrated to the US from Poland so there's a whole lot of "Nazis are evil" sentiment floating around my family (although I'd say the "Russians are evil" sentiments are just as strong).
My advice for OP is to learn about the history and nature of antisemitism, and to teach his kid about it (in an age appropriate way). Anti-semitism isn't like other forms of hate-- we are not painted as weak and dumb but as smart, wealthy elites who "pull the strings" so to speak. I find that at times it pervades even leftist spaces because of the notion that "Jewish" and "wealthy bankers" go hand in hand, and the notion that Jews are "oppressors." Of course, these are all stereotypes, but they have a long history that's worth learning about. You may want to also look into antisemitism in the Muslim world, which I know less about but I've heard is pervasive.
Also relate all this to forms of bigotry that you see where you are in the world. Learning about a "foreign" bigotry means nothing for your son if he can't use that knowledge to recognize types of bigotry that are right in front of him.
Actually, at that age is when they are supposed to learn it. I studied to become a teacher, and it is at around age 10 you are to teach about democracy, national minorities, and human rights. This is a good time to talk about the opposites as well. A loss of innocence is not only encouraged, but actually something the children themselves seek out at this stage. It's a good part of their development where they become more caring about their peers and surrounding. A personal anecdote is that children this age are also, for the same reason listed above, super intense to deal with. They are very mean to each other and you as a teacher. I have worked with children from preschool, to high school. The worst ones are the ten years old.
That's a good angle, to talk about antisemitism. But it is not enough when we deal with the holocaust. There are a lot of political, ethnical, and other groups, that suffered in the holocaust. The first ones to even be targeted was the communists. Which is natural. Marx was a jew, and a communist society is a state- and moneyless society, where the collective owns the production. It is the opposite of nazism, which views the whole world as different hierarchies, with the "arians" at the top. I think therefore to only talk about antisemitism still misses what the holocaust was about. It was about erradicating everyone the nazis viewed as an enemy. One of these could be a group you belong to. That is what is important, to make people understand that the nazis do not care if you support them, cause once you served your purpose, you'll be treated the same as everyone else.
I think you're worrying too much, and I would suggest using their hyperfixation to your advantage.
What makes naval battles so cool - the giant guns? Let's read about the differences in ship guns and how German gunpowder differed from British, allowing them to use different kinds of tactics.
Is it the isolation of ships, where each one is more or less a little universe of their own at sea? Let's read some more cool maritime stories about explorers and pioneers.
WW2 fits a particular niche for many people, and that doesn't automatically mean Nazis. The tanks were pretty darn cool, and so were the innovations in infantry tactics.
I'm just chiming in with my experience growing up. While you can cultivate empathy and critical thinking during family discussions, those are controlled situations. You won't have time to come up with metaphors and analogies when violence or sexual implications pop up unannounced, especially in movies and TV shows. That's when my parents would be blunt and say something succinct, e.g. "this is death", "this person wants sex and you don't have to do it if this happens to you", "there are lots of good and bad people in this world". I'm not sure how you would modify your approach if your child has an ADHD diagnosis though. Due to under-developed emotional maturity, maybe you do need to be more direct (see Mayo Clinic article).
Perhaps you could look to kids shows like Avatar the Last Airbender which feature concepts of facism, genocide, engineering, morality, and finding one's own path. Though the show intended to parallel Chinese atrocities, it would be an opportunity to discuss the actions of the Nazis/Germany and the ways that history has repeated itself. Good luck!
My parents always tried to teach about the atrocities of WW2, with naval warfare there is a level of abstraction that keeps the topic psychologically comfortable, but the moment you get into things like the Maxim gun or chlorine warfare in WWI, you start to see the context of how people can do evil. With WWII, you see how the Germans applied all they learned and engineered factories of death. I’m Polish so it was easier to organize the trip, but when I was 12, we visited Auschwitz. I mean… I guess you can bring in the facts of the Holocaust, but I think it’s important that war and genocide are not perceived as an abstraction.
Thanks for your perspective. We watched a clip from Band of Brothers the other day about the liberation of a concentration camp which led to some very good discussion about hate and why this happened.
I want to second this. To some extent I feel that 9 is a bit too young to talk about war and genocide because these are serious topics with a brutal reality that should not be watered down and 9 is a bit young to be exposed to the more gruesome aspects of it.
https://youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
Not sure if he has found this channel yet but thus is probably the best resource for WW2 fans. The war against humanity series is probably the most important series iv seen in a long time but there is so much variety on there that he will be busy for a long time.
Also worth checking their between two wars series.
Thanks for the advice. I might try it.
Having said that, I was talking with her grandmother at a birthday party and in conversation it came out that she had been born just after her parents had fled East Prussia in the face of the Soviet advance so I'm sure there are a lot of complex emotions there.