What Should We Share with Our Kids?

With everything that is happening around us the past few months in our world, I have been having a hard time with deciding what and how to share, filter, and explain recent events to my children.  Our son is almost 9 and can read for himself and understands news briefings so it’s hard to keep anything from him.  Our 4 year old daughter is a little more oblivious but she still catches on to things.

In our family, in our home, we have always tried to keep the lines of communication open.  We encourage the kids to ask questions and we do not shy away from explaining general current events or history to them.  We don’t watch the news on our tv very often, but we do read up on current events and discuss as we see fit with the kids.

Covid-19, the pandemic, quarantine, policy brutality, racism, and the Black Lives Movement are just some of the very serious things that have come up in a lot of our family discussions the past few months.  I admittedly found it very hard to delve deep in to these issues with our children, and my husband and I did decide on exactly how far we would go in our discussions, but at the same time I felt a sense of relief in being able to be the ones to explain these things to our children first.  And help them understand a little bit about what is happening where we live and around the world.  This is the first time since becoming parents I think we have had to get so serious on so many topics at once, but rather than shielding our children from the truth, we thought it best to start the discussions now.

The kids have surprised me at how mature they are and how much they already intuitively understand the world around them.  We all have a lot to learn and we were honest with our kids that as a family we will continue to work on our awareness and do what we think is right.  And if the kids are confused, we will be their sounding boards.