I don't plan to shield her from current events forever, for goodness' sakes. But...she is 7, and has been known to cry in her bed and shake because she's so terrified of tornadoes *just generally.* I am not going to expose her to media coverage of recent and terrible tornado destruction.
Right. She's obviously not ready for that.
Truthfully, I want my children to be distressed by war and cruelty.
I don't want my child to enjoy war and cruelty, but that doesn't mean I want him to be paralyzed by them either. I want him to be calm and self-assured in the face of adversity. I'd like him to be able to understand things without being fearful of them.
The point about asynchronicity is a good one. We seem to have somewhat different approaches. I would like him to be comfortable thinking about anything he's ready to think about, and if I can give him coping strategies to enable that, so much the better. You seem to want your daughter to develop as naturally emotionally as possible, and allow her to be emotionally young while she's physically young. I'm not finding fault with your parenting approach; I mostly want to keep my son from experiencing too much psychological stress while he thinks about whatever occurs to him. I also believe in letting him see or read anything he likes, within reason, because I want him to develop as he likes.
Part of my thought process is that one may actually make an anxiety problem worse by supporting it, like keeping a knee brace on too long after an injury may weaken the joint. But that doesn't translate into a value judgment of how anyone here is raising their children-- far from it. Even if your daughter were my child, I would probably find that she wasn't ready for things in the same way, at the same times, or in the same order as my son. I might find that she wasn't ready for the film "A Clockwork Orange" until age 10, whereas DS5 just loves it. (I'm totally joking around here, although he does honestly love "2001".)
I just wanted to throw into the discussion that giving my son lots of little coping tools and working to expand his horizons a bit has apparently been working well for him. You have your own coping tools which you use with your daughter, in your best judgment as to her readiness level for different information.
