Newspaper Article

FROM THE WRITERS' CORNER: Four Voices; Robert Coles: Children's Questions

Robert Coles is a physician who teaches at Harvard and the author of "The Moral Life of Children.", Coles, Robert

1987

Overview

I am also told: ''This comes from lots of trouble we have. We have been spending, and we have to stop, or we will be owned by foreigners, and that is bad.'' I asked for a bit of clarification, and am stunned to hear this: ''We are being conquered. The ones we beat in the war'' - meaning the Second World War - ''are now taking over. The President is fighting Iran, but that is not the country taking us over.'' The boy has heard his father grapple with that irony, and made it his own. Her father, a neurosurgeon, explains to her that he has never seen ''it'' either and, furthermore, he has never put a penny into ''it.'' All his money is in their ''regular home,'' the girl proudly announces, and in their ''summer home.'' The only ''crash'' that could hurt such an investment, she drolly tells the boy, and three other children, and me, would be ''a hurricane, if it hurt our property.''

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: CHILDREN AND YOUTH / COLES, ROBERT (DR) / STOCK PRICES AND TRADING VOLUME / STOCKS AND BONDS