Personal Essay: Iran's Children
How are families handling the crisis?
by Azadeh Moaveni
June 29, 2009
Summer vacation, however, has created other challenges for families with kids. Before the state began repressing demonstrations so viciously, parents who wanted to attend traded baby-sitting shifts so that they could join the marchers peacefully calling
for the election results to be annulled. These absences, and the palpable sense that something was quite wrong, had kids asking questions that even adults were hard-pressed to answer. "Cheating is really bad," my cousin's 8-year-old said plaintively. "Why
would the president cheat?" Another friends' daughter couldn't fathom why a government would ignore its citiziens' grievances. "If everybody is so upset, why don't they just listen?" she demanded of her mother, perplexed with the opaque answers she'd been
receiving. Given Iran's history of democratic protest and violent revolt, parents could do with a volume like "Revolutionary Parenting: How to Talk to Your Kids About Political Unrest." But the country's parenting culture doesn't rely yet on books for guidance
(though TV programs on children's psychology are hugely popular), and most parents look to the lessons they received as a child.
When the crisis in Iran first began to unfold, I tried to hide my turbulent feelings from my two-year-old son. I dashed into the kitchen to cry, pretended I had hay fever, and anything else I could think of to explain why I was red-eyed days on end. But
my son, like all children, refused to be out-witted. He stood in front of the television news, arms akimbo, demanding to know why there were fires in Iran. Though I knew a two-year-old would have no ability to absorb anything I might tell him about Iran's
political reality, I decided it was worse trying to hide the truth from him.
Sooner or later my son would understand that he was Iranian.After all, I had grown up in the early years after Iran's 1979 revolution, and vividly remember my family sitting in the kitchen late into the night, weepy or angry. This is our destiny as Iranians, I concluded, to be attached to a homeland that is still
experiencing massive political upheaval. This instability meant anguish for my parents' generation, and it looked like it would mean that for mine also.
Sooner or later my son would understand that he was Iranian, and that the country of his birth differed vastly from the modern Western society where he was being raised. A place where, in the words of the critic James Wood, the day's "most arduous choice
has been between 'grande' and 'tall.'" I learned that Iran was a rich but fraught nation while playing with Barbies in California. I think this knowledge helped prepare me for understanding the conflicts that grip much of the world beyond the affluent, democratic
West. I gave a report in my sixth grade class in Cupertino about the Iran-Iraq War, and felt for much of my childhood that my home — though a place where people were glued to the news and wept about it — was somehow also a window onto the world.
I sat my son down with some bread-sticks and apple juice, and did the same thing my friends in Tehran were doing. I tried to explain as simply and gently as I could that sometimes people in power, just like people on the playground, behaved awfully. Because
my son adores Thomas the Tank Engine, the island world of Sodor supplied a useful context for our talk. The Fat Controller, or Sir Topham Hatt, wields a kindly authority over his stable of trains; Thomas, Percy, and the other engine admire him for his justness.
Presidents of countries, I explained, must be fair to their people, just as Sir Topham Hatt is fair to his trains. My son took this all in gravely, nodding. These days, however, he's mostly concerned about Iran's phone lines. Why are they broken? Is it the
wires? Why don't they send a repair man to fix them?
©2009 Azadeh Moaveni and Babble
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