Which messages can my child see?
The most important facts about the topic:
The flood of news on the internet can be overwhelming, even for adults. Unlike children and young people, they can keep horrors at a distance or categorise them correctly.
Children lack this self-protection. Bad news scares them and is a huge disappointment for them. They prove that the adult world is nothing but a place of failure.
Children and young people need to understand the world they live in. Only when they learn to realistically assess and categorise events can they come to terms with them.
Read the full article with 4 specific tips on how special children's formats can provide guidance.
Everyone is currently talking about fake news. This particularly perfidious form of manipulation threatens to divide society and jeopardise democracy. That's why parents and educational professionals agree that children and young people today should be able to debunk fake news.
There is just one flaw: the latest PISA study found that pupils in Switzerland and other countries lack the ability to distinguish between opinions and facts. That sounds alarming at first and also distracts a little from the fact that even many adults fall for lying articles.
It is true that dealing with fake news is extremely important, but it is more of a second step. Firstly, we should think about how children and adults generally relate to news.
News flood in the internet age
In the past, the communication of current events was reserved for newspapers, radio and television. But today, news reaches us practically every second via the internet. Society has never been better informed than it is today - but this has also made it more anxious. Reports of violent offences, for example, worry us greatly, even if the crime statistics in this country would probably not give us any cause for concern.
What's more, news from around the world is rarely positive, but mostly terrible: drivers deliberately drive into crowds of people, dictators starve their people to death and people of other faiths are brutally killed in distant regions.
When children hear about wars, terrorist attacks and natural disasters, they immediately want to find out from their parents whether something similar could happen in their region.
If we let all this get too close to us, we would no longer be happy with our lives. At some point, we had to bitterly learn to keep all these horrors at a distance.
News scares children
This healthy repression is a form of self-protection. But younger children are not able to do this and teenagers find it very difficult. Why is that? Because the news often reflects the gruesome reality and therefore triggers fears and nightmares in children.
When young girls and boys hear about wars, terrorist attacks and natural disasters, they immediately want to find out from their parents whether something similar could happen in their region.
Dealing with news - 4 tips for parents
- Watch the children's news regularly with your children and be available to answer questions. Help them to get organised.
- It is not a weakness to be unable to do anything about the adversities of the world. But we still need to do everything we can to give our children a sense of security.
- The PISA assessment also highlighted the fact that children who read printed material are better able to cope with the world. In contrast to fast-paced television, they can follow their own pace in magazines and books and look things up again and again.
- There is no security. Nowhere.
At times like these, we all wish we could protect children from the darker sides of this world for as long as possible. Unfortunately, that doesn't work.
At the beginning of the pandemic, for example, even the youngest children had to realise that they were not allowed to visit their grandparents because they could unknowingly infect the elderly with the potentially fatal coronavirus. Understanding this alone is painful and difficult for children.
Most of the time, however, they hear the news in passing, for example when short messages on the car radio interrupt the cheerful music or when parents talk about a current event that concerns them over dinner. In any case, children observe how we deal with the news. How do we react? Are we affected, shocked or seemingly calm and indifferent?
Bad news is a disappointment
In my opinion, however, there is another reason why children would be only too happy to do without news. It is necessary to leave our adult point of view for a moment and to consider the strict moral standards of young children.
Their ideas follow an optimistic logic: if, for example, everyone pooled their money, no one in the world would have to go hungry any more. And if everyone loved or at least respected each other more, wars would no longer be necessary.
Admittedly, this may sound naive, but it is by no means a false ideal. That's why bad news for children is above all a huge disappointment. They prove day after day that the adult world is nothing but a place of failure.
As soon as children sense the powerlessness of their parents, they begin to doubt whether mum and dad can really protect them from any danger. And because the adults don't even seem to be able to seriously counteract climate change, teenagers are already going to demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction.
How special children's formats can provide guidance
Children and young people need to understand the world they live in. Only when they learn to realistically assess and categorise events can they process them. Only children and young people who are in possession of the necessary information are able to form their own opinions.
This also includes understanding obscure connections and recognising the far-reaching consequences for them and ourselves when forests burn on the other side of the world.
And if you don't know that there are military conflicts in distant countries, you won't be able to understand why families flee and why the new classmate doesn't speak our language. But who is supposed to carry out this mammoth task?
Because television is a fast-moving medium, children still need adults to talk to them about these topics.
Children's news on television, for example, is a highly recommended medium. In Switzerland, «SFR KinderNews» offers good guidance.
The latest daily news is presented briefly and in a child-friendly way. Explanatory films also provide further background information. The makers know how to inform their young target group without leaving them with bad feelings.
Children's news thus makes a contribution to dealing with world events. However, because television is a fast-moving medium, children still need adults to discuss these topics with them.
In parenting, however, this remains a delicate balancing act because we want to remain honest and authentic but not frighten the children. This concrete confrontation is the first step in protecting them and ourselves from fake news later on.
