A. Terrorism and major natural disasters are thankfully very rare events, but when they occur they capture our full national attention. Because we as adults want to learn what happened in these disastrous events in great detail, our media outlets set about supplying us with as much information and as many visual images as they can. Exposure to all of this information can have unintended negative consequences on children. For instance it became clear after the 9/11 attacks that young children could develop acute stress reactions and posttraumatic stress disorder simply from cumulative exposure to media coverage of the event, even though the attack itself did not impact anyone they knew personally.1 Video images of a disastrous event are particularly difficult for preschool-age children to process, as they may believe that each image they see represents a new event occurring.
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