As they send their children to kindergarten, parents receive handmade art projects from their toddlers every day. In winter, children make snowflakes and Christmas decorations out of paper. In autumn, they color the outlines of leaves to help them understand the changing seasons.
However, one preschool took real creative liberties with its art projects when a parent was confronted with the disturbing and darkly humorous masterpiece his child brought home.
Father showed the troubling art project assigned to his toddler in preschool.
His wife recorded the revelation on video as the father came into the living room with two pieces of paper in his hand.
“What is the question?” she asked, and the father responded with a question of his own: “Do you think our three-year-old in our church-sponsored kindergarten should trace and color the events of September 11?”
The father turned the picture over and revealed a page from a coloring book showing a plane flying into the Twin Towers.
The toddler made a bold artistic effort with the 9/11 theme, coloring in the plumes of smoke rising from the building with a yellow crayon and adding a series of green scribbles to add his own touch to the totally age-inappropriate drawing.
The mother screamed with laughter and asked the question everyone was asking: “What?”
“This is the last thing I expected,” she said, laughing even more.
“I was just staring at it in the kitchen,” said the father.
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He turned the page over to reveal a second page that her preschool toddler had colored and on which she had read the phrase, “Never forget.”
The mother giggled in disbelief and delight before making a very apt objection to the date, declaring, “It’s July 31st.”
Aside from the fact that the September 11th Remembrance Day painting event took place in the middle of summer, the parents’ reaction reflected how bizarre it was to show preschool children these shocking images.
People left their own questions in the comments, with one asking, “Whatever happened to macaroni art?”
“This is equal parts hilarious and terrifying,” wrote another.
The mother added her own analysis in the comments, calling the project “the exact opposite of anxiety-relieving coloring books.”
The events of 9/11 were a world-changing tragedy that changed everything from geopolitics to the way we go through airport security, yet one must wonder, as these parents did, why exactly young children are being exposed to this issue.
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The mother told the explanation she had received from her son’s kindergarten as to why they had been given coloring books with 9/11 motifs.
“We asked about it,” she said in a follow-up post. “The best answer we got was that the summer theme was ‘Dancing Through the Decades,’ so they chose that for the 2000s.”
“They said that in the 2000s they had a whole bunch of things to choose from and that this particular teacher just chose this one,” she continued.
“They could have at least created a page called ‘Facebook’ and then colored the letters and maybe learned age-appropriate things,” said the mother, stressing how absurd it was to introduce the concept of a terrorist attack to such young children.
Someone in the comments noticed the discrepancy between the preschool’s chosen theme of “Dancing Through the Decades” and the coloring book itself, and guessed that the true theme was “Dancing Through the Darkness of the Decades.”
“It’s so crazy that they did this but I love how you guys handle it with a little sense of humor,” one person commented.
Dealing with life’s hardships with humor is an essential coping mechanism. Finding the funny side of parenting is another important skill, especially when faced with the unexpected, and these parents seem to have mastered it.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango’s news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture analysis, and all things related to the entertainment industry.
