Opinion | My Teenage Son Thinks the World Is Falling Apart. I’ve Changed How I Talk to Him About It.

Within our marriage, my wife and I have a clash of cultures, which means we talk to our kids quite differently about the state of the world and its future. We play somewhat typecast roles. I’m the upbeat dad from America; she’s the no-nonsense mom from Poland. We’ve created two different schools of child-rearing; it’s pretty much Disney versus the Iron Curtain.

My wife, Kasia, handles hardship better than I do. In general, she is very at ease when discussing the morbid, the poignant and the tragic. You might say this is her native habitat.

Kasia grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in Warsaw. There was no coddling there. When she was in first grade, her teacher took her on a field trip to the site of a recent plane crash, where she stared at the charred sneakers of dead passengers. The lesson seemed to be: Bad things happen, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. Oh, yeah, and build better planes. That plane, by the way, was headed to Warsaw from — where else? — the United States. The symbolism went deep.

When our boys were toddlers, and they asked us about death, I hemmed and hawed, while Kasia explained: I will die, your father will die, and someday you will die. As you can guess, tears were shed, but death was thus accurately explained.

Kasia lost her own dad when she was just 10 years old. At the time, her father — a renowned mathematician — was living in France and fighting a losing battle with cancer. No one ever told Kasia, or her brother, about the cancer. When she learned that her father had died, the news came as a complete shock. Now, as a parent, Kasia favors something close to complete transparency. She once told me, “I just want to protect the kids from feeling unprepared in case something terrible happens.” That still breaks my heart.

I, by contrast, enjoyed a largely tragedy-free childhood. I grew up in the glow of the 1980s, going to the mall, listening to Men Without Hats on my Walkman and watching “MacGyver” on television. Oh, MacGyver! Is there anything in this world that can’t be fixed with duct tape, a Swiss Army Knife and a roguish smile? You get the idea. I believed, wholesale, in happy endings. As a parent, I offered my boys the same upbeat reassurances that my own parents offered me, when the Cold War was raging and Ronald Reagan was assuring us that it was “morning in America.”