Life Kit - What to say to kids when the news is scary

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

The news can be devastating, and tragic events can be incomprehensible for adults — so how do we talk about them with kids? Child development experts offer advice on what parents, teachers and other caregivers can say to help kids process all the scary news out there.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi there. We're all thinking of the victims and families of the Uvalde school shooting this week. If you're struggling about how to talk with your kids about this tragedy, this episode might help. First, it was the radio. Then, television. And now, the internet. Bringing news of the outside world into our homes. Wait, Corey, what is this? That was pretty good, right? Is this? I thought this was Life Kit. That was my announcer voice.

I'm doing an old newsreel. Oh, okay, great. Well... We're talking about news in our homes, right? Oh, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so we are. So, yes, we are all taking in news all the time, this crazy 24-hour news cycle. But what we don't always realize is that our children are often listening right alongside us.

And sometimes that's not so great. I was really little during the Vietnam War. Allison Alcuin grew up in rural Louisiana. My dad was in favor of the war and watching the news in the evening after work. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past. Allison says her mom didn't want her watching the daily drumbeat of Vietnam coverage, but... The way that our house was set up, it was sort of impossible for me to completely miss it.

I was just disallowed from like sitting down in front of the television and watching. And I think that my mom thought that she was doing a better job of protecting me from it than she actually was. So I would catch sort of glimpses of the film from Vietnam and, you know, just sort of words. And one of those words confused and terrified her. Where a squad of U.S. 8th Cavalry is ambushed by an entire regiment of Viet Cong guerrillas. Several hundred of the estimated 2,000 guerrillas are slain. The art of anti-gorilla warfare. I know I'm not the only one of my age group that had this happen,

that we heard the words guerrilla warfare and we thought gorillas, like apes. And I literally had a plan for where I would hide in my closet when the gorillas came. I'm Anya Kamenetz, an NPR reporter and the mother of two girls. I'm Corey Turner, an NPR reporter and the father of two boys. And you're listening to Life Kit for Parents with Sesame Workshop. We help you answer the really tough questions that kids can throw our way about things like death and race. And in this episode, how can we talk to our kids about really scary stuff in the news? Yeah, because in our super wired world, we just can't protect them from hearing everything.

We'll have that when we come back. So, Corey, my formative scary news event as a kid was the challenger explosion i was in kindergarten and you know in my memory it was live in my classroom i can't find out for sure if that was true but i remember all the build-up all the excitement and then seeing that light just go off in the middle of the blue sky and having no idea what had just happened. What was yours, Corey? I'm a little embarrassed by mine, but growing up in the Midwest, it was all about tornadoes. In the spring and the summer, I so vividly remember my dad always tuning into the local

news, and any time the sky would get even remotely dark. And after a tornado struck, again, it was like wall to wall, local news on TV with pictures of the destruction and stories of how many dead. And I just remember feeling so powerless. I don't think it's embarrassing at all. I mean, I grew up with hurricanes and it's just this power that you have no way of understanding. And so for this episode, we also asked for your childhood memories of news events, and you'll hear them all the way through this episode, like Allison. Some are scary, and some are just really out there.

And, like we always do on Life Kit for Parents, we reached out to our partners at Sesame Workshop. For this episode, we sat down with our old friend, Rosemarie Trulio. She is Sesame's senior vice president of education and research. Listen, I've been working at Sesame for a long time now, but when I go to the set and Elmo talks to me, I talk to Elmo. He is real. We also got help from Tara Conley. She's a professor of communications and media at Montclair University. I'm not a parent,

full disclosure, but I am an auntie. Whether it's a tornado or a terrorist attack. Whether the kids heard about it on the internet or on the playground. We've got six takeaways

to help you and the little people in your life make sense of a world that can feel really overwhelming. Yeah. Takeaway number one.

We can control the amount of information. We can control the amount of information. We can control the amount of exposure. Rosemary says, for starters, try not to let your kids watch or listen or browse the news without you. And try not to stream it or leave it playing on the background all day long. Because my parents had 24-hour news just kind of on around the house throughout the day, I absorbed more news as a child than I probably should have. Molly Lewis is one of the many folks who shared their story with

us. She was six years old when the 1996 murder investigation of JonBenet Ramsey was getting wall-to-wall coverage. JonBenet Ramsey and I were pretty much exactly the same age, and I knew that murder was a thing, but I had assumed up to that point that murder was just a thing between adults. And suddenly I was learning that children could also be murdered. And what's worse, they could be murdered in their homes, potentially by someone that they very much trusted. Oh, my gosh, that is such a heavy thing for a six year old. Absolutely. And I mean, but it's going to happen if kids spend too much time with content that's not meant for them. And I remember, Corey, a couple of years ago,

Common Sense Media reported that 42% of parents of young children say the television is on always or most of the time in their home, whether anyone's watching or not. Wait, wait, 42%? Yeah, yeah. Parents of kids under eight, right? Yeah. And without realizing, right? So it's pretty common. So I asked Rosemary about this. So concretely, should we not have news on in the background when our young kids are around? I think that's probably a good rule of thumb because you can't control. You can't control these breaking stories, which are always breaking. So that's priority number one. But what if you did your best and your child still sees or overhears something on the playground or online? Yeah, I mean, you and I both know when your kids get a little older, you cannot control everything they see and hear.

And so something's going to come up. It's going to upset them. They're going to have questions. Yeah, and you're going to need to talk about it with them. Exactly. And that leads us to takeaway number two. When you do have that conversation with your child about something they've seen or heard that scared them, you need to begin by asking them what they know.

Tara Conley, the media researcher, says to choose a quiet moment when the phones are down, the TV's off, maybe on the way to school. Allowing them to have that space where they're asking questions about what they're seeing, how they're feeling, what do they think, you know, who do they think the story is talking about. Basically giving kids a space to reflect. And she says this also gives them permission to bring up something that may really have been bothering them. Also asking what kids already know.'s a really important first step because anybody who has kids knows that kids often will develop these wild misconceptions when they don't know the full story. I mean, they have very little background knowledge and very little understanding of the wider world to help them here. And this brings us to our next takeaway.

When we're done asking questions to figure out what exactly kids do or don't know, give them facts and context. So when the Sandy Hook school shooting happened in 2012, Rosemary's own son Lucas was in elementary school then. She didn't avoid the subject. She made it really clear with him that children were killed. I wanted him to see the faces of the children. I wanted him to understand what happened.

But she also stayed calm. That's important. Yeah, and she didn't overload him with a lot of information. Does he need to see all the gory details? No. Does he need to know of every event that's happening? Absolutely not. Now, as you hear all this, you need to keep one thing in mind. Different kids are going to ask different questions, and they're also going to need

really different things from us. That's exactly what I heard from Evan Neerman. He's an old acquaintance of mine, actually, who moved to Parkland, Florida a few years ago, and he lives there with his son and his daughter. His son turned 11 the day after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. His daughter's eight. My daughter, she wanted to talk about it. She was interested in hearing the stories of the victims. She wanted to play an active role in putting stuffed animals and flowers on the makeshift memorials and really talking it through. And my son, on the other hand, he didn't want to talk about it very much. So give kids facts and context based on the other hand, he didn't want to talk about it very much. So give kids facts and context based on the questions they're asking or your sense of what you think they need in the moment.

I mean, you know your kids best. Tara Conley, the media researcher, she thinks this is all really helpful for kids. Make sure they understand that the media can't talk about everything. You know, journalists choose their stories and some stories they just don't choose to tell. This is important. Not everybody's story gets told. Ask what messages are missing, what's omitted from the story. Who did they not talk to? Yeah. Who are you not hearing from? Who are you not hearing from? And who do you want to hear from? You know, Common Sense Media, we brought up before, they did a survey of children's perceptions.

And they found that 69% of kids thought that the news did not capture their own experiences at all for people like them. Yeah. Well, and, you know, one other thing that Tara said really struck me, that we don't just want our kids to treat media like it's this window we just look through. She wants kids to see the frame, to help them, again, put all of this stuff into context. Absolutely. So that takes care of the conversation about what exactly happened. But you know, Corey, the next question we're inevitably going to get as parents is why? And that is takeaway number four.

When you're asked why something happened, especially something really tragic or violent, avoid easy answers and focus on the helpers. Both of the kids at various points have asked, why did he do it? And they know his name. And they asked, why did he do it? And there's obviously not a great answer for that. It's hard to explain. Evan is still struggling to answer his children's questions about why the Parkland shooting happened. Yeah, and Rosemary says we should resist the temptation to answer that why question by labeling people. I don't like talking about bad people. Bad guys.

Bad guys, evil guys. There are people who do bad things. There are people who do evil things, horrific things. I don't like labeling people because I think that's overused. Maybe this person didn't get kindness and didn't get love and didn't get nurturing. So we can't figure it out all the time. That's basically what Evan and his wife settled on, telling the kids the shooter was someone who wasn't well and needed help. But he says... It doesn't explain it completely. I mean, let's be real.

Nothing can truly explain away something so awful. And sometimes we don't have the answers to all of these whys. And it's really important for parents to say, I don't know why. I don't know why this person chose to go into a church or a school and to shoot people. I don't know why. I want to sit with this for a second, Corey. I mean, it's a really good point. It's something we talked about in the death episode.

You know, grownups, we would love to, but we don't always have to have all the answers. And oftentimes that's when we get in trouble with our kids is when we pretend to have answers that just aren't good. But Rosemary does have a strategy here. She says no matter how dark things get, we as parents do have the ability to highlight the good. Yeah, this is the famous advice that Mr. Rogers said his mother gave him. When something scary is happening, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.

Yeah, Rosemarie did this when she was talking to her son about Sandy Hook. The shooting happened on a Friday, and she says she kept Lucas away from the TV all weekend. We didn't turn on the TV until President Obama spoke. Because while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need. And it was a memorial service. So once again, we focused on the positive, how people were gathering and taking care of each other. Tara agrees with this, especially when it's an event where young people are being targeted, like a school shooting or police killing. She thinks it's empowering. Our natural instinct is to find those that are the antagonists in that story. But who are the ones around us that are actually helping us get through this? Who are the ones that,

you know, save the lives of young people at that moment? That's where we should focus. And there's even evidence that talking about helpers with kids really does make a difference in how they see their world. After the Columbine school shooting in 1999, Sesame did a study of children's perceptions of the world through their drawings. There was a lot of preoccupation of death. They would have rest in tombstones, rest in peace kind of drawings. They would have guns and knives and dead people. But after the September 11th attacks, just two years later, Rosemarie says media coverage was different. I think the news flipped it a little bit and talked a little bit more about the country is strong.

The country is coming together. We are united. We are going to get through this. And she says that this made a real difference for kids. After 9-11, when we did the same study, they talked about heroes. They talked about helpers. You could see this also in the drawings that the children made. Police officers, firefighters, American flags. And this shift gets us directly to our next takeaway. Yeah, number five, help kids process what's going on by encouraging them to tell their own version of the story. Children often try to make sense of what they see and hear in creative ways, through art, through play.

They're on YouTube. They tell their own stories. They're crafting their own music, which I used to do a lot when I was a kid as well. I didn't have YouTube, but I did have a tape recorder and I would go upstairs and, you know, sing and be a pretend DJ. But all of that to say that, you know, the notion of play is part of reconstructing their own stories and just allowing for that to happen. So we've got a pretty crazy example of this. Yeah, it was 1995 and Natalie Van Balen and her friend Joel, who lived in Connecticut at the time, were in second grade.

He'd come over to my house after school for playdates and would always want to enact the O.J. Simpson trial. I remember lots of stuffed animals on our couches, I guess to give the effect of a full courtroom. And in retrospect, this is pretty terrible. But whenever our family's Cocker Spaniel would enter the room, Joel would say that that was the ghost of Nicole. Wow. I guess that's kids' imaginations for you. Yeah. And as wild as it sounds, Tara says this is a core human adaptation. It also helps us make sense of the world around us, particularly when we're bombarded with information.

We adults do this too, in a way. I mean, instead of physically acting something out or drawing a picture, we might retell news stories in conversation at the dinner table. Yeah, or we retweet or we comment or post memes. Yeah. Kids need to understand that media is constructed. Well, what does that mean? Well, you can now construct your stories. You could do a video. You can make a new story. So Tara tells her students that if something they learn in their classes, say about racism or sexism, something in the news upsets them. And I tell them, I say, you know, hold that because at the end of the semester, you're

going to create something and remember what you're feeling right now. Remember that jolt. Remember that question. And I want you to come back to it at the end of the semester. And I want you to make something from that. So our jobs are right in the middle of the news, Anya. But even from that position, I find the most upsetting thing about reading or watching the news is, like I said in my original story about the tornadoes, just makes me feel powerless. Yeah, and I mean, adults feel that way. Children feel even more powerless. That's just the nature of being a child sometimes.

So we can encourage kids to respond creatively. Or, our final takeaway, when there's something happening in the world that you're struggling to talk to your child about... Don't just talk about it. Take action. So at the beginning of this episode, we heard from Alison Alcuin about her memories and fears about the Vietnam War, stuff she just half overheard.

And Alison is now a mom, and she takes a pretty different approach with her daughter. She just talks to her up front about everything in the news. Like, you know, the Newtown version of guerrilla versus guerrilla. Alison adopted her daughter on her own from Ethiopia, and they now live in New Orleans. My name is Adilawi Okwun, and Adilawi is spelled E-D-E-L-A-W-I-T. Right now, Adilawi is 11. She was 7 years old when Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

I just didn't know what to think. It was just, it was so scary for a lot of different people's lives. It was scary for my life. And I think when I process stuff, I just think about, oh my God, could this happen to me? So she says then and in the years since then, whenever something like that is happening, she and her mom follow a series of steps. She always tells me about something,

and I always have time to process it. And then she says what I can do to protect myself, and she always has it in that order, and then we go and protest, like a day later. And I was talking to her about that, and she just said she never noticed that she did that. Tara, the media researcher, says, In talking with our children, we also have to show them how we're helping too.

And asking them, you know, what do you, how do you see yourself as a helper in these situations? In other words, don't just look for the helpers, be the helpers. So for your family, that might mean going to a peaceful rally or protest like the Alquans do or raising money together for a cause. Or writing an elected official. Or if it's a natural disaster, Rosemary says, taking action might mean involving your child in practical planning. As a family, we need to be prepared and need to put that emergency preparedness kit together. So at home to be practicing fire drills. So include your kid in these preparations. Include your child in the preparations.

That is key. Okay, so now it's time for a quick recap. First takeaway, keep things on a need-to-know basis. Don't leave the TV on. Maybe I will turn off NPR more often. It's hard, Corey. I know. It goes against all my instincts. Takeaway number two, when the time comes to talk with your kids

about something scary in the news, pick a quiet moment and start by asking questions. Questions about what they're seeing, how they're feeling, what do they think, you know, who do they think the story is talking about. Takeaway number three, give kids facts and context. Takeaway number four, when you're asked, why do bad things happen, especially when people are doing the bad things,

avoid easy answers and labels and focus on the helpers. Talk about how there's good in the world. There's good in your community. There are people who care about you. There are people who keep you safe. Our takeaway number five is encourage kids to tell their own version of a story. Kids need to understand that media is constructed. Well, what does that mean?

Well, you can now construct your stories. You could do a video. You can make a new story. And finally, takeaway number six, when you're struggling to talk about something that's happening, don't just talk about it. Find a way to take action with your kids. Special thanks to Kenneth J. Doka, Robin Goodman, and Robin Gerwich. Dave Anderson at the Child Mind Institute. Caroline Knorr at Common Sense Media. Tara Powell, Joy Ossofsky. And of course, Rosemary Trulio and Lizzie Fishman and all of our friends at Sesame Workshop.

For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We've got ones about homeschooling your kids, one with Sesame Street's Grover that's just for kids. You can find them at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love Life Kit and want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit newsletter. If you got a good tip, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823 or email us a voice memo at lifekit at npr.org. And here, as always, is a completely random tip. This time from NPR's J.C. Howard. If you want to reheat pizza in the microwave without the crust getting all gross and chewy,

put a glass of water in the microwave with it, and it'll taste freshly baked. If you've got a good tip or a parenting challenge you want us to explore, please let us know. Email us at lifekit at npr.org. I'm Corey Turner. And I'm Ani Kamenetz. Thanks for listening.