Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Current events, news... how much?

I'd like to get ideas on how parents here handle the news. The bad news that falls under war, crime, drugs, burglaries, etc.

Since gifted children can be more sensitive and feel emotions and opinions more strongly, how much do you share about what's happening in the world, at what age? Do parents leave the newspaper out for them to read independently? How do you gauge how much information to share with them? So that they don't begin to develop fears and worries that interfere with their sense of security and peace?

Well my mother thinks I'm negligent because I don't watch the TV news and therefore my children weren't always aware of what is going on in the world.

It really depends on their age, and the story. I was out of the country during 9/11 and my oldest was about to turn 7. My children were home with my husbands parents watching them. At that time we deliberately kept what was going on away from my my 7 year old daughter, (and my son but at 2 that wasn't as hard) Thankfully her school made a policy not to talk about the trama but it's a wonder she didn't pick up much from the other kids. My inlaws were very good at not watching the TV news when the kids were home. We did have conversations about it when we got back and she didn't have to worry about us.

As they aged, I would often tell them in my own words about major breaking news. They were going to hear about it on the playground, and around other kids and I wanted them to hear the information from me first.

My children are now teens/young adults and I encourage them to read the newspaper as much as they want. Or watch/read news online. I will particularly talk to them about something going on. Last weekend big headlining news, I made my son read about as I wanted to discuss it with him. This particular issue hits close to home for a number of reasons. I particularly wanted to talk with him about some of the the deeper issues and before he started seeing some of the stuff online. My parents also turned my son onto the Daily Show, and he now records it and watches it when he gets home from school. I usually watch it with him and this gives us a chance to talk about the issues.

At age 10, I know there are some things he should know about. Some things... but how do parents present it?

His school offered the Rachel's Challenge presentation. Big assembly supposed to teach tolerance and respect, Rachel's message from her diary entries, just before she was a victim at Columbine High School. But the assembly included the scary 911 phone call recordings, and school surveillance video showing the two shooters, as well as their up-close faces making those scary and angry comments from their personal video movie they made. Does anyone remember this assembly? I just wonder if this was the best way to teach tolerance and respect.

My son was worried for a couple of days about going to high school.

We screen very hard here. We do not watch the news. However, we do read. Our local paper has things like community happenings which are more event oriented. He can read this.

Most of our news comes from DH and I screening online news. We usually pick things of current interest (usually science). We will also highlight current worldwide events for cultural exposure. Ex: France will celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day next week.

ETA: We talk about historical wars. We talk about why people go to war, when it is good, when it is bad, etc. We talk about conflict resolution, etc. So even though he knows there was a really bad man making some really bad decisions in WWII, he does not know HOW people were treated during that timeframe. (and now back to the original message.)

We do NOT show anything which would trigger personal fears. We are still struggling with a movie watched in preschool with predator/prey themes in it.

Personally, I would be very upset with the school for showing the gore and detail as you described.

We teach tolerance and respect by noting how wonderfully different characteristics from different people enrich our lives. We also teach that everyone is different and unique. We also have a lot of discussions as to how paradigms influence decisions and that's ok.

I didnt talk to school because after couple of days seemed he forgot all about it. I think he deliberately put it out of his mind. I wonder if I did the right thing by not talking to them. I wonder if I should talk to my son again about school violence... I guess its not necessary... but I still dont understand how exposing him to the fear and violence taught him anything.

I really think it depends on the child. For me, animal cruelty and violence against children, particularly sexual crimes, are always most personally disturbing.

To this day, I try to avoid these types of stories, as I become personally fixated on the victim's suffering and have difficulty getting over my sadness/vengefulness on their behalf. I generally read The Economist, The Atlanic, and Ars Technica on an ipad, and these give me the "hits" I'm seeking-- economics, politics, technology, and current issues, so our household is fairly benign.

I store up my wrath over the world's many injustices and pour it into raising my son to be a good person, as well as lobbying my elected representatives and working in the non-profit sector. I know that my efforts contribute to protecting the vulnerable, and that's the message I want my son to hear when he's older: you must rise up against oppression and demand change. I want his first exposure to weighty issues to be through seeing my husband and I working to overcome the challenge, because I think an internal locus of control is necessary for not becoming overwhelmed by the senseless violence and injustice in the world. So my answer is that he'll volunteer alongside us from an early age and meet real people impacted, from the perspective of being the solution. It's a little Harry Potter-esque, I guess.

Not sure if that is helpful, but that's the untested approach I'm thinking I'll take.

DD's emotional regulation and social precosity has meant that we've never really shielded her in any way-- which was fine for her.

She saw news footage of 9/11 as a toddler. She knew what she was watching, much to my horror (in retrospect-- and she didn't see much of it, because THAT, we felt, was something that definitely called for censoring for our 2yo). But she processed that just fine-- she didn't bottle it up, (well, once she knew that WE knew that she knew) and she asked questions, etc.

For her, I dunno, but this is going to sound super-weird, and I think that it deserves explaining specifically, because NOT censoring things has been a very deliberate choice on our part. Okay-- my DD nearly died at 11mo old, and somewhere, there is a visceral memory of that. Okay, so it could happen again without warning (and has, on a few occasions); that sense of powerlessness is a very hard thing to live with. It takes a lot of courage and-- well, nerve, I guess-- to live knowing that all the time. Because she has pretty much always known that, it made so very little sense to us to shield her from all of this stuff that she observed and asked endless questions about ANYWAY. In some respects, this is a self-serving decision on our part, because we WANT her to be tough this way-- people are sometimes incredibly mean to her for reasons that have nothing to do with WHO she is, and everything to do with WHAT she is. That just plain sucks. But it doesn't suck so much that she ought to waste her time dwelling in self-pity. I've seen kids raised with chronic medical conditions paralyzed by it, and so I knew from the minute of her diagnosis that this was something to avoid. She needs to be STRONG-- and she also needs to know that others have it way, WAY worse than she does.

KWIM?

But she isn't even most gifties in this respect. She is tough as shoe leather in some respects, and this is one of them. Her response is to DO SOMETHING about stuff that bothers her-- or to live in such a way that the world is a better place for her having been in it today.

One other thing that I've learned over the years, too? Because I have a child that talks and interacts with others as though she is many years older than her age, adults sometimes tell her things that they'd never DREAM of saying to a child of her chronological age. If she hadn't already known that her diagnosis was potentially fatal, the children's librarian let that one out of the bag right in front of my wide-eyed 5yo after prominent media coverage of a similar fatality. Another adult, remarking obliquely on the disappearance of a local young woman, referred to some things being "worse than dead." (Meaning, if she was being held and tortured). DD, then 6 or 7, insisted on knowing what on earth that person had meant by that statement, since she'd been exposed to the virtually wall-to-wall coverage (some of it national). So yeah, we discussed rape and torture with her-- because SHE WANTED TO KNOW. Really.

She seems to have an internal center of calm that is undisturbed by this stuff, however. It's not that she is detached, or doesn't understand. She does. But she processes it, and places it in its proper place in her understanding of the universe and the people in it. She sees the good in the everyday, as well. So it seems that we've done okay in this regard-- but honestly, it did make me wince when my 3yo confessed that her favorite show on TV was CSI.

HK my dd4 does the same thing, I was gutted to find out dh had been watching the news with her while I put ds to bed. He said last week the first time he didn't have an answer of her was when a transsexual one Eurovision a few weeks ago, personally I would much rather my dd knew about that than war and rape etc. water off a ducks back to her though. I would really stress about her empathy levels if I didn't see her day to day interactions

Mostly I despair at the standards of journalism these days that I can't watch news on TV or read the papers due to the sensationalizing and editorializing, let alone worrying about what the news is actually about No, I don't let my kids watch the news, both out of concern for quality as well as content. They're too sensitive and prone to worry. We do talk about important and relevant current affairs as the interest takes us.
MIL is of the generation where the world stops while you watch the 6pm news so I have to try to coach the kids into ignoring it and finding something else absorbing to do while they're at her house. Sigh - they still come home worrying about Russia starting WWIII

I was a journalist for ten years, and I'm still a news junkie. We don't have a TV, but I hang out a lot on reddit and twitter and spend an hour or two each morning reading news from a variety of sources - world, national, industry - before I start my day. My spouse also likes to keep up with world events and news, especially keeping up with news within our industry. Because of this, our kids have grown up with the news of the day being fodder for dinner conversation on a daily basis. But our conversations not only discuss the what is happening but the possibly whys and outcomes. We also have talked at great length about what we can or cannot do to effect change over something we see in the news. After one story about the children at a local hospital having very few toys to play with, we talked about it over dinner, and our kids - on their own - chose several toys that they thought were sturdy, interesting, and in good enough shape to donate. It took a sad story and created not only an empowerment over the bad news but a great lesson in sacrificing personal gain for the greater good. Our kids have all synthesized news within the context of their own life and knowledge, and so the disgust and outrage over horrible events is tempered with the larger understanding of it being an event and not an edict of all human behavior.