The Heavy Topics - Too Much for Little Kids, or Just Right?

"Mom," my five year old asked, as we stood in line to board a plane in the New Orleans airport, "Can we talk more about Hitler?"

I stuttered, trying to think of a response that would sound normal, but would also signal to everyone around us that we'd just been walking past the WWII museum and our interest in Hitler was purely historical.

But over the following months, I found that her interest in Hitler was persistent.  She still asks, out of the blue, and always in terribly inappropriate places, for me to tell her more about Hitler.  She's also interested in Japanese internment camps (I highly recommend Fred Korematsu Speaks Up for a very accessible book on the subject), Anne Frank, slavery, and (very recently) the Donner party.

And, so, I wonder, am I a bad mom for talking to her about these things? I'm lucky: my kid does not get nightmares or get queasy or obsessive when she learns about these subjects.  I know that, for some kids, just a discussion about concentration camps would lead to weeks of sleepless nights. Not so for my girl. But, I had to show my six-year old Schindler's List (she was riveted) because I simply could not remember anything else about Hitler or the Nazis to tell her! And what kind of parent shows her kindergartner Schindler's List?

It makes me feel guilty. And then I come to work and my middle schoolers and high schoolers don't know what the internment camps were. They are not sure who the bad guys were in World War II. They are totally shocked to learn that slaves were brought to the United States by force.

As shocking as their gaps in knowledge are, it's easy to see how kids miss information -- or misconstrue the information that they do learn. The other day, my girl asked me to confirm that slavery doesn't exist any more (and, of course, nerd that I am, I had to explain that it's illegal in the United States, but that there are still people who are held against their will...). I confirmed that slavery is illegal and she followed up with, "That's right. Because we don't use cotton anymore."

"That's right," I almost agreed with this very sensible-sounding statement. Hold up, what? "We don't use cotton anymore, so we don't need slaves," she explained.  We were on the tail end of African-American history month.

I was proud that she knew that slaves often picked cotton, but we clearly needed to review, "What do you think your shirt is made of?"
"Fabric."
"Where does the fabric come from?"
"The fabric store."
"Ok, yes, but what is it made of?"
Shrug.
She was very surprised to learn that it was made of cotton -- and that the cotton balls we use to clean her ear piercings are made of cotton.  As we walked home, I was able to disentangle the existence of slavery from the existence of cotton in her mind.

But I had to wonder where this idea came from.

I can only figure that they must have talked about slavery in passing in class (it was African-American history month, after all), but I suspect the teacher didn't want to get into it too much.  And, where the teacher left off, my girl filled in the blanks, completely incorrectly.

Our kids do this all the time. There are topics that we find so important, that we don't talk about them.  We wait for the right time.  We wait until our kids are ready. Sometimes, at least, in the meantime, the kids "figure it out" for themselves, and not always correctly.

The other day, a co-worker asked me when students should learn about jury duty.  We tried to puzzle out if kids would learn about it before 12th grade civics. We sure hoped so. But our middle schoolers and high schoolers knew almost nothing about juries. Surely some of their parents must have been called to jury duty, but they did not transfer that information to their kids.  My girl knows about juries because I had to serve a few months ago and I talked about it incessantly. She learned about jury duty just by listening to me when I had to spend a week calling in and trying to predict if I would have to go to the court.  Imagine what she would have learned if she had been a sentient human the time I actually served on a jury! Just by talking to her about my life, about a truly boring, but important aspect of my civic duties, I was able to teach my kid a civics lesson that we expect all citizens to understand -- and which a whole lot of young people know nothing about.

As adults, I think we often forget to talk to our kids. And sometimes, we deliberately don't talk with them because we don't want to get things wrong, or we want to avoid bringing up topics that we worry they are not ready for. But there are two worse alternatives: they never learn about "the important stuff," or they learn the wrong way.  I think, for all the times she embarrasses me asking about Hitler in public, I will continue to err on the side of talking when I can.