Knowledge is power, especially for those who are as relentlessly concrete and logical as some of our kids.
I don't know if this is true. More knowledge is not always reassuring. Sometimes, learning more makes you even more anxious. Frankly, I avoid stories about global warming at this point. I know how it works and what it's going to do, and reading about it makes me feel extremely agitated and upset. We do many, many things to reduce our contribution to it, but I feel deep and overwhelming despair if I read too much about it, and that can be paralyzing. I also avoided the news for a while during the height of the GWB presidency because it was making me intensely depressed about the state of the nation.
What's more, sometimes even firm knowledge doesn't seem to help much. DD has read all kinds of authoritative sources that say the sun is not going to burn out for billions of years, but she still worries about it.
If a child knows some things about an alarming subject but might lack other information that would be reassuring (eg: there are no volcanoes in our home state), then knowledge can be very useful. But I don't think there is a blanket statement to be made here.
