You're at your dad's house with your young boys, and he has news on his TV. He greets you, and the boys go to the toy bin next to the TV. After you've had coffee and talked with your father, he gets up to fetch an article from the coffee table where the boys are playing, and you see him talk to the older boy who asks a question and points at the TV.
Your dad looks at the screen, which has an unsteady on-the-spot news camera panning a situation where many swat members with guns are waiting outside a building. Your dad looks over at you, then says to your boy, "I'm not sure, let me go ask." His eyes stern with thought, he walks over to you. "Your son wants to know why three police officers have been killed. He said that's what the man on the TV said. I didn't know how you want to explain that."
How do you begin to explain to a 6-year-old, or a 10-year-old, or even a 15-year-old why someone shot someone else somewhere in the world, why someone bombed a building of people they didn't know, why a mother drowned all her kids, or why a child was stolen by a stranger? Any good parent will be concerned about what sort of rationalizing their children will devise to understand a fairly stable path through life. But what sort of reasoning can you suggest to explain the irrational actions of misguided and frightened people?
You wave your boy over to the table to avoid his little brother hearing the conversation. He asks you about the cops and you say:
"They were shot because someone was angry at all cops and wants to punish them all."
"The person who shot them thinks those cops did something bad and wanted to stop them."
"The person who shot them is crazy and doesn't know how to show his feelings right."
"Sometimes bad things happen and we don't know why. We have to just keep doing the best things 'we' know to do."
"Don't worry about it, it doesn't have to do with you. What are you building over there?"
Dodging the subject is the easy way out so you don't have to approach the difficult task of explaining something horrible. Your child may move on and gleefully show you the Lincoln Log cabin he built. But I guarantee that he will remember having heard that three cops were killed that day. It will hover, unanswered and scary like a monster in the closet, and within your child, you've created diminishing trust that you would be straightforward and talk about life with him.
On the other hand, beginning by saying you don't know why they did what they did acknowledges that things are happening in the world where he cannot see, and shows that you truly can't understand what brings people to commit murder or do anything else horrible and so he shouldn't expect to understand either. Your child would need to see that killing people is a real thing that happens sometimes and that it's strange to you, not something tolerable that people do all the time like double-parking or talking loud in a theater. "What happened is wrong," might be a good thing to add if you think your kid needs to hear it.
Sheltering young minds from the horrors of the world has been a long-standing practice, and maybe a difficult one today. As parents we want our children to be blissful and not have a care in the world. As developing children, they are concentrating on forming words and sentences, building relationships with parents and siblings, being social with neighbor kids and even pets. It is a lot for kids to work on, and they shouldn't have to worry about someone who was hit by a car, a woman who was beaten by her husband, or a kid who lit a school on fire. There would be time enough later to learn the hard stuff after the brain develops a little more. Here is an article supporting the gentle teachings of young children at home.
While I admire the intentions of not putting too much too soon on young children and the practice is usually filled with love and caring, I can't help but think of the future plight of the child who is kept from what we perceive as bad influences. Violent movies, talk of drug use and sex can be hidden by a life of reading books screened by parents, avoiding public places that offer spontaneous profanity, and learning pertinent mind-building lessons at school. It may be considered a blessing to have that much control over one's family influences, and it seems to me that life could be lived in safety with the outcome being a confident, intelligent, goal-achieving adult.
Then I think of people I've known, and it seems that it's the street-wise, strong-willed, sure-footed individuals who are created with a thick layer of tolerance, understanding and empathy because they encountered uncomfortable situations in childhood and survived. If the confident, successful adult suddenly encounters a horrible situation in which adapting suddenly to strained circumstances is necessary, shock may render them helpless because they are so used to the sedentary, safe, predictable lifestyle in which they were raised. A a child, this sort of situation has guidelines for parents such as this article about helping kids cope with traumatic events, but the tools for coping with unpredictable and uncomfortable circumstances in life without the advice of a mentor are crucial to living as an adult in today's world.
What I see it coming down to is this: If a child's lifestyle environment has a degree of instability while he or she grows up, they are going to be better able to keep balance in unstable situations later in life. This works best with the right guidance and barring psychologically damaging trauma. A swear word here or there in a movie, innuendo or evidence of prejudice will stipple their experience with the negative feelings in small bursts so that when they're a teenager and hear these things among peers he or she won't react in a way that will label them a prude.
The key here is that someone they trust should be nearby who knows how to properly explain these things as they come up. I myself embraced this manner of open child rearing even though my inclination as a new parent was to keep my boys from the negative energies of violent actions and cursing. When I realized that I had no control over what my kids would hear or see in the world and that I wanted my boys to know what they're up against spiritually and socially, I just made sure I was there for them if anything happened.
Keeping children from the traumas of life, little or huge, seems like the logical thing to do and it may work for some people in their stable lifestyles. But while the focus is usually on how the child experiences the world through either sheltering or exposing, what should be considered is how the child learns about the home and who he or she can trust through such rearing. In unstable circumstances children look for the most secure anchor to help them balance, and they can't see who that is if the way is always smooth. Taking steps out into the undesirables of the world with your child (via TV shows, public transportation, anywhere with spontaneous social reactions,) teaches them not only how the world works, but how they can count on you in that sometimes-frightening world.
