At what age do you talk to your kids about terrible current events?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think this is different than it used to be, at least for those of us who pay attention to what's happening right now (sociology and political science degree here, plus I protest every Saturday).

My children are in 1st and 3rd grade, I talk with them about basically everything. Their father is black, I assume white kids are way more sheltered about what's happening to certain communities in America right now. We talk about ICE, Trump, school shootings, really whatever is on the news I don't shelter them, though I wouldn't want them watching certain footage like people being attacked etc or footage from the shootings.

I see people here are not as radical as me. My kids are happy, and I don't talk about it all the time.

This bolded part is interesting. We're a black family and, based on the responses so far, we are talking to our kids about these issues much more than other families. Not so much because we're radical (maybe we are? 🤷🏾) but because they're topical AND our kids have questions or initiate the conversations anyway.

We try to limit discussions about school shootings, but our kids (8 and 10) have asked about the helicopter crash in the potomac, wildfires, Elon Musk, Trump, ICE, "war" with China and a host of other current events. The kids are having the conversations so we realized it's best to have preliminary discussions so they aren't caught off guard or being overly influenced by false information/uninformed opinions.

[Anonymous]

I talk to my kid whenever she is exposed to the information. I don’t believe in sheltering. It cripples and confuses. I don’t dwell on negative though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My oldest was 6 when sandy hook happened. It was really hard figuring out what to say and how but we did talk about it.
I think for stuff like the Brown shooting, I probably wouldn’t raise it with kids under 8, as that won’t even seem relevant to them. But kid over 8 probably worth a “maybe you heard about this …, do you want to talk about it?” Convo. It really depend on how close it hits home for them. For most 6 year olds, News about 6 year olds massacred in school will provoke anxiety, but news about a shooting at an office jbuildkng across the country won’t register for them. So if you are Jewish, the synagogue shooting might be more traumatic for your child and you might want to preemptively address it.

My kids were a few years older with Sandy Hook but still ES and same dilemma. We did talk about it but it was very hard. We did not say how many children died. We talked about mental illness. And now we know it unfortunately became a routine part of their childhood. Kids do hear things at school so you have to think about who you want them to hear it from.

[Anonymous]

My oldest is 7. I actually realize I had a different experience than my son because of the internet. So I can remember my parents watching the news and seeing pictures of the Oklahoma City Bombing in the paper when I was my kid's age, but I don't watch TV or get a physical newspaper. So I do remember the picture of the firefighter holding the baby who had been killed.

I try to keep my kid at least a little informed but I do realize he's not encountering a lot of the stuff I did at the same age. I do try the Mr. Rogers approach of focusing on the helpers, so talking about the guy who tackled the shooter as well as the shooting.

[Anonymous]

Oh yeah, we tell them everything.

We're like "well there's this agency called ICE and they snatch people off the street and put them in vans and then no one knows where they are until they end up in another country, and there's nothing anyone can really do about it because it turns out that our system of checks and balances doesn't actually work but we didnt realize it until now and now no one knows what to do because Congress is completely feckless and our judicial branch is a bunch of dithering academics, so now we just wait and hope it eventually ends somehow."

No, we don't talk about. What's the point? It seems completely age inappropriate and will just create needless and exaggerated worries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Oh yeah, we tell them everything.

We're like "well there's this agency called ICE and they snatch people off the street and put them in vans and then no one knows where they are until they end up in another country, and there's nothing anyone can really do about it because it turns out that our system of checks and balances doesn't actually work but we didnt realize it until now and now no one knows what to do because Congress is completely feckless and our judicial branch is a bunch of dithering academics, so now we just wait and hope it eventually ends somehow."

No, we don't talk about. What's the point? It seems completely age inappropriate and will just create needless and exaggerated worries.

Are you concerned that they're having the conversations with other students? My kids have come to us with some very wrong opinions about current events that they picked up from other kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh yeah, we tell them everything.

We're like "well there's this agency called ICE and they snatch people off the street and put them in vans and then no one knows where they are until they end up in another country, and there's nothing anyone can really do about it because it turns out that our system of checks and balances doesn't actually work but we didnt realize it until now and now no one knows what to do because Congress is completely feckless and our judicial branch is a bunch of dithering academics, so now we just wait and hope it eventually ends somehow."

No, we don't talk about. What's the point? It seems completely age inappropriate and will just create needless and exaggerated worries.

Are you concerned that they're having the conversations with other students? My kids have come to us with some very wrong opinions about current events that they picked up from other kids.

Not really. Adults have stupid, uninformed opinions all the time. They're just kids. I'm sure they believe all kinds of goofy things. If they bring it up and clearly want to talk about it, or if they express some extremely nutty view about something that happened in the news, we will correct them. But we are not looking for reasons to discuss terrible things that happened in the news, partly because we can't know what weird interpretations they might take away from such a conversation, completely unbeknownst to us. Sometimes kids draw the entirely wrong lesson from things.