Do you discuss the news with your school age children?

Hello!

We choose to discuss major news stories with our child in year 3 – to prevent schoolyard stories/rumours and exaggeration being the first they hear about things such as the French Terror Attacks. Do others do this, or hope that such issues are not discussed in the schoolyard. By this age, children can read headlines and try to fill in the gaps as best they can – often through discussions with other ill informed children. We found it very helpful to discuss such issues at home for this age group – have you?

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6 replies
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- - mom160421, NSW said
  - 08 Nov 2018
    6:24 pm
Yes, we’ve always talked about what is going on in the world. We always tried to keep it age appropriate.
- - mom134803, NSW said
  - 22 Sep 2016
    11:33 am
Our eldest are in year 5 & 6 and we watch the news together. They also get a weekly quiz about the news for homework. I show my 6year old sometimes fragments of the news.
They also watch behind the news series at school, which I think is good.
I’m from the Netherlands and we always watched a special news for youth, wish they had that here !
- - mom109093, NSW said
  - 01 Aug 2016
    7:24 am
Our eldest is year three too. We rarely have the news on when the children are awake as there is too much that they don’t need to see (ages 2, 7 and 9). Our eldest is prone to worrying, so minimising exposure to sad or scary news works best for us. That said, we have a policy of being honest if they ask us questions. They can come to us and ask us questions about things they have heard and we will explain it to the best of our ability.

Our eldest is starting to take more of an interest in the wider world however, at this point I have found that 1) he is easily influenced by the opinion of the newsbroadcaster when he does watch the news and 2) he appears to be attempting to seem more grown up by discussing the news even when he doesn’t really understand it. For this reason, I think we will soon have to move towards something similar to you soon
- - mom93821, NSW said
  - 28 Nov 2015
    6:17 am
We have always talked about everything age appropriately.
- - mom81879, NSW said
  - 24 Nov 2015
    8:16 pm
My kids, at that age, had no interest in the news or newspapers so they knew nothing about world affairs. If they ever came home talking about things and had the wrong information, we spoke to them and set them straight
- - mom90758, NSW said
  - 24 Nov 2015
    2:35 pm
Yes, we generally do that. When my daughter was in primary school we used to watch together “Behind the News”. A great kids program to talk about what happens in the world.