I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with teaching kids about all the current horrors of the world, like global warming and terrorism and all that horrible stuff. Not because I support sheltering children, because I'm very much against that, as you might have already guessed, but there are two issues that always seem to crop up whenever this gets discussed. First of all, it's difficult to explain these kinds of things to children in terms they understand. And if you dumb it down to the point where the importance of it is diminished ("Hitler was a very bad man."), then they're not going to really understand what the big deal is. Anyone's who's ever had to explain the Holocaust to a small child knows what I'm talking about.*
More importantly, I think, in a strange sort of way, it puts a lot of pressure on kids. When you tell a kid that everything kind of sucks in the world, they're going to want to do something about it. They want to help. Kids are optimistic like that. And that's the thing, they can't. Well, they can make a small impact with donations and stuff, but they can't fix everything. It seems a BIT cruel to me to tell kids, in a roundabout way, "The world sucks and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it." But maybe I'm reading into it too much.
On the other hand, NOT talking about these things gets you a bunch of ignorant people, which isn't any good either. There's gotta be some sort of balancing act between not sheltering your kids and not completely traumatizing them. Of course, most people are terrible at parenting, so it's kind of a crapshoot. Oh well, not like I can do anything about it.
*Don't ask.
No comments:
Post a Comment