Something to prepare them for real life?
That… really depends on your politics. It could range from ‘There are bad people who want to hurt us’ to ‘we are bad people who hurt people and sometimes they decide to try to hurt us back.’
They start active shooter drills in Pre-K. That’s 3-4 years old. You’re kids are going to be more likely to be shot at school than a police officer after 20 years of service. Homie, they get told.
I have 18 month old twins. They’re not old enough to explain things too, but I ponder this type of thing a lot.
Basically my plan is multi-faceted, but I’ll acknowledge up front that it’s untested and likely contain grave errors, but like any parent since the dawn of time I’ll try to learn from my errors and adjust my strategy.
I’m not going to dumb anything down. If you’re old enough to wonder where babies come from then you’re old enough to understand that males produce sperm and women produce an egg and the two combine to produce a baby. That doesn’t mean a 4 year old needs to learn about STDs or abortion or rape, just that there’s no harm nor shame in learning.
It’s going to take a lot of time. Not to explain things, but to maintain a relationship where my kids feel comfortable asking me about awkward things. Not “why is the sky blue” but “why do I feel this way” or what ever.
Also, I plan to be honest and frank about the limitations of my knowledge. This is something that as an adult I find frustrating about my own childhood. My parents did their best within their means and societal norms, but whenever they didn’t know something they just made it up usually within some kind of religious framework. If I know part of the answer then I’ll acknowledge that I don’t have the whole answer and suggest how we might learn more.
To answer your actual question though, I don’t think one really explains terrorism on any given day. Like you could explain that terrorism is the use of fear for a political or ideological objective, but that’s not really an understanding is it. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand people’s motivation for this type of hatred and I hope my children do too.
I have nothing to take away from that, I have one that’s six and this is basically my approach so far.
One thing I’ve learned to do is to demonstrate what to do when I don’t know something. If I don’t know a certain fact, I’ll go to Wikipedia on the spot and see if it’s there.
I’m also not perfect, but I’m a big fan of it and I support it with donations so yeah. Least I can do is provide an example that doesn’t involve an AI overview.
Yeah there’s a poster in the clinic we go to for the kids vaccinations that says “kids learn what they live”.
So yeah, 100% they’re going to see that I don’t know everything and that I try to figure things out.
Long before they’ll ask on their own, they’ll learn about it in school every and ask you questions prepared by their teacher about how it affected you.
sit around the campfire, and tell them how bush destroyed a huge us building and killed us citizens in order to kill more people somewhere else.
