We kept the tv off last night. Our 6 and 7 year olds did not need to know what was going on at the Boston Marathon and since their schools did such a nice job of dealing with the Newtown situation, we didn't feel like we needed to inform them of what was going on in the world.
I dropped dd off at school today and had to sign a permission slip, so I went into her classroom to grab a pen off of her teachers desk. There was a sub leading the class who started speaking about what happened in Boston yesterday to the class. I cut her off quickly and told her that we would not be speaking of this in this class. She was embarrassed and made some remarks about how it was all over the news and hard to miss. I told her we made sure that our 7 year old missed it for a reason.
I vented to the school librarian (a friend of mine) about what happened and she told me that I HAD to speak to the principal about it because that is NOT the way they do things at dd's school. She said that other schools she had worked at did not work as hard to make school a safe place. She said her previous school would have had the news on for the kids to watch. ACK!
What is the culture like at your children's schools? Do they talk about tragic news without prompting from the students? Do they work to not talk about it in groups?
I thought it was so interesting that the librarian was surprised by the culture of keeping school a safe place for children to be emotionally. She said it came as a big shock when she started there.
