The Middle Distance

Trying to find some sort of balance with my kids drives me crazy. I don't want to make basic things like sex and death and illness a big blank to them, and I can't imagine how it could be done in this family anyhow. At the same time, most news media spend lavish amounts of time on the sickest, goriest murder and abuse cases every damned day, and yes, I want to filter that. I want them to know that bad things happen, but I don't want them to grow up thinking that that's ALL that happens. They don't need to be trained to react as if everybody outside their own little clique is a life-threatening danger.

I try to give them as much correct information as I think they're ready to handle. The older one is much less disturbed by gore than I am. With him, the problem's always to get him to remember that those are real people on the news, not video game graphics. The younger one has the same problem I did with a very vivid imagination. He'll have to learn how to get to the information without ending up paralyzed with horror. That's still a hard one for me to do myself, so I don't know how well I'm going to succeed with the kid.

If a 14-year-old girl is upset by what went on in the Holocaust, then her parents should congratulate themselves on raising a daughter who cares about other people, and try to help her process what she's learned. If the school is having a good wallow in atrocities to try to get through to the most jaded kids and leaving the empathetic ones to flounder, the school needs to give the second group some support and not just tell them to stop being so sensitive. But if the parents just didn't think their little darling should have to deal with anything unpleasant, tough.