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How to Talk to Children About the News

How to Talk to Children About the News

By: Dr. Olaf Jorgenson, ACDS Head of School

Parents sometimes wonder how much – or how little – to share with children about major events in the news. Last year after she visited with staff and parents, I asked Sheri Glucoft Wong how she would advise us to manage children and the news.

Sheri said that there are times in school communities when we feel the news needs to be addressed. For example, back in 1986 when the Challenger spacecraft exploded, it was a serious issue for children because a teacher died, and some children were afraid that their teachers weren’t safe. It was important for adults to explain that this event was very unusual and to reassure children, and the same could be said of wildfires and earthquakes: “This happens, but not very often, and there are people making it safe.”

Elections offer another opportunity to talk with children about the news. As Sheri says, “home is the training ground for how the world works,” and elections allow you to teach your children what you do when you’re happy or unhappy with how things turn out. When the news immediately touches children’s lives, adults can find a way to help children hold it.

Usually children encounter the news by hearing about it at home. Generally teachers at ACDS don’t introduce current events to young children. They instead take their cues from what is relevant to the class (like we did during the pandemic, being careful with what COVID information to share, and what could be disturbing). That said, sometimes even young children bring the news into the classroom, and our teachers respond in developmentally appropriate ways; in the early grades, that may mean directing questions or comments back to their parents. 

Adults feel deeply when situations or incidents in the news affect us; we look for forums to talk about it. Sheri says that when we consider children as a forum, we need to ask ourselves in the moment, “What is our goal when we teach our kids?” For most of us, our answers would include, “To teach children skills, and prepare them for the world.” 

But again, Sheri notes, we should be mindful of what’s developmentally appropriate. It doesn’t work with young children to deliver information about specific topics in the news, and expect them to process those topics like an adult. What sticks with children is the way information in the news they encounter applies to them. It’s the “how” they relate to, from their perspective as children, and that we need to be aware of as adults. We need to be sure that our adult-sized opinions and anxieties don’t make the “how” troubling or confusing to our kids.

One of the principles ACDS teachers hold is that we strive to teach students how to think, not what to think. With regard to the news, this means we ought not to confuse news headlines with the stances behind the headlines. “White collar crime is up almost 15% in 2022.” That’s a headline. “The current administration is soft on crime, and especially crime committed by the privileged class.” That’s a stance. As Sheri puts it, the stances are the parent’s job, not the teacher’s.

Sheri told me that in her work across dozens of schools in the Bay Area and in Southern California, she’s observed that as everyone  tried to return to “normal” following the peak years of the pandemic, and while the U.S. continues to come to terms with deep divisions over politics and COVID, a national reckoning on racial justice, and the explosive volatility of social media propelling these and other controversial topics in the news, there are a lot of issues adults are processing. We need to be judicious about how we engage with younger children, and how these adult issues impact them. As Sheri puts it, we need to be able to get in our children’s shoes – but not get stuck in them.