This article was shared in my grad program Facebook group because one of our resident professors authored it. I think it's an interesting issue for discussion. I recently talked with my mom about what it was like explaining 9/11 to me as an 8 year old -- how to expose to your young child that the world has fundamentally changed in the blink of an eye on what was a supposedly sleepy Tuesday morning. The author's children are between 11 and 13; I first got into politics in the 3rd grade (7 or 8 years old). I work with senior level government officials, all of whom have young kids and deal with frankly terrifying world events on the regular.
I don't have kids and don't ever plan to have them. But, having been a kid and being invested in international relations, I'm interested in hearing what hubski thinks about talking geopolitics with your children. At what age do you think it's appropriate? What topics do you discuss? Should you wait for a large scale event to discuss it or try to formulate a bit of background knowledge like the author does here?
The television news was playing in the background during most my childhood. PBS news hour for the most part and a few roundtable discussion shows on the weekends. I think it was a great way to for me to become familiar with politics and current events. It started hundreds of conversations. I've meant to start watching news hour in the evenings with my kid around. I'm not really worried about her becoming terrified at it, I think she inherited a slice of ruthless monster from her old man. As to your question, each kid is different. My kid seems pretty interested in the world, and I plan on filling her up with as much factual information as I can and I will try and be wary about pushing too many opinions. Telling kids what to think about difficult issues prevents them from learning to think about things critically. Right now she is only four. We concentrate on things like geography but I'm sure things will ramp up in the years to come.
my family never watched tv news but we did listen to a lot of talk radio whether it was in the car or as background noise while my mom cooked. i read the newspaper a decent amount too. i don't exactly know when i formed my political leanings but i was leftist from as early as i can remember. i won an award in the 6th (?) grade for writing a paper arguing that LGBT issues were the next Brown v. Board (I have no idea where this essay is now but I would love to get my hands on it) and it surprised my parents that i had formed this opinion independently. so whatever my parents did seemed to work well in terms of me independently forming and educating my opinions. thank you for your feedback!
My first experience to geopolitical stuff was seeing news stories about the atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda when I was 8. I think they are the reason why I'm a bit of a knee-jerk liberal interventionist.