COMFORT, REASSURE SCARED CHILDREN.

Mental health professionals suggested today that the best way parents can help children cope with the terrorist attacks is by remaining calm and offering messages of love and kindness.

But it's important to be careful about what news coverage your children see.

``It doesn't help that the television is showing children in the Middle East who are clapping and thrilled that lives have been lost in the United States,'' said psychiatrist Carole Lieberman. ``I think that is the saddest and sickest of images I've seen.''

Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, said the adults who carried out the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., were taught as children to hate. She encourages parents to stress the importance of loving your fellow man and to remind them that ``we're all human and we're all fragile.''

Dan Daly, a psychologist and associate executive director of Girls and Boys Town in Omaha, Neb., said there is no way to completely shelter children from the frightening developments.

``Parents need to remain calm,'' he said. ``People have a tendency to panic. Their children see this and then the children panic.''

Lieberman said even four hours after the incidents, many people still seemed to be in shock over it. ``Now that the same things (such as the World Trade Center collapse) are being shown again and again, depression is setting in.

``Parents should be ready for nightmares, and regression to bygone behavior such as bed-wetting,'' she said.

In the melting pot of Southern California, new race issues may develop at schools and ball fields.

One Moorpark mother said she reminded her teen-age son that several students at his school are Middle Eastern, ``and they are no more responsible for this than you are.''